The main character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is Humphrey Chimpden Ear-wicker, a pubkeeper in Dublin who is trying to live down an undisclosed crime he committed against a young woman (or man) in the park.
Earwicker is also known as Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childer Everywhere, and is linked with Adam, Jesus Christ, Napoleon, Jonathan Swift, and Tristram.
Edward Alleyn played Doctor Faustus in the original production of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, circa 1589. Alleyn also played the lead in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587).
Dr. Spielvogel is the psychiatrist to whom Alexander Portnoy tells his story in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
The bank employee Joseph K. is arrested for no apparent reason on his thirtieth birthday Kafka’s The Trial.
Edward Stratemeyer, under the pseudonym Victor Appleton created Tom Swift.
The annual prize for poetry, the Bollingen Prize, was first awarded in 1949 to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos (1948).
The book describes the epidemic of bubonic plague that ravaged England in 1665. Defoe’s fictionalized account was published in 1722. Defoe himself was only five years old when the plague hit London.