Who is the hero of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)?

The first published work of the poet and novelist Alice Walker was a book of poetry: Once: Poems (1968). She followed up soon after, however, with a novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).

Henry Fielding summoned poet laureate Colley Cibber to court in 1740 for the murder of the English language. Fielding issued the summons under the pseudonym “Captain Hercules Vinegar.”

Rubaiyat is the plural of the Persian word meaning “a poem of four lines.” The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur is a poem composed of such quatrains. The twelfth-century Persian poem was translated freely into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.

Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group concerns eight women students at Vassar. Their names are: Dottie, Helena, Kay, Lakey, Libby, Pokey, Polly, and Priss.

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) says “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul” in “Invictus.”

Bloomsday, the date on which James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is set, is June 16, 1904.