The wits who traded barbs at New York’s Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s included:
Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Frank Case, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Neysa McMein, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert E. Sherwood, and Alexander Woollcott.
The Algonquin Hotel still stands. It was recently sold to a group of Japanese investors.
The interminable law case in Dickens’s Bleak House was Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a case stemming from a dispute about distribution of an estate.
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. It dates from the thirteenth to the first century B.C. The New Testament was written in Greek in the first century A . D.
Sappho (b. 612 B.C.), a lyric poet whose work exists only in fragments, was called the “tenth muse” by some classical writers. Married, she lived in Lesbos and led a group of women who were devoted to music and poetry.
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.
The glazier Heurtebise (literally “break wind”) aids the poet Orphee in rescuing his wife from Death. Cocteau has written that the name of Heurtebise in the play Orphee was revealed to him in an opium-induced vision. The name obsessed Cocteau to the point that he thought another being was living inside him.
Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne are buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Massachusetts.