Mocha Dick was a legendary white whale said to have killed more than thirty men and attacked several ships in the 1800s.
His story was told in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839.
Melville’s Moby-Dick of 1851 may have been influenced by the story.
Paul Clifford (1830) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel begins, “It was a dark and stormy night”. It is also the opening line of numerous novels by Snoopy.
There are three short novels in the 1939 collection by Katherine Anne Porter: 1. “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” 2. “Noon Wine” 3. “Old Mortality”
The group of writers and thinkers, the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey, among others, was named for the place where they held their meetings-46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London.
The title to the drug-induced stream-of-consciousness narrative Naked Lunch means a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” and is repulsed by it. The title was suggested to the author William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac.
Washington Irving and fellow American writer John H. Payne were said to have competed for the affection of the author of Frankenstein during a visit to France from 1824 to 1826. Mary’s husband Percy Shelley had died two years earlier.
The animal in the 1865 Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is named Dan’l Webster.