Born in 1266, Beatrice Portinari, wife of Simone de’ Bardi, was Dante’s junior by one year.
They were in their youth when Dante (1265-1321) fell in love with her.
She died in 1290, leaving Dante in mourning. He wrote about her in the Vita Nuova (1294) and the Divine Comedy (1321).
Ralph was the embattled elected leader in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
In Don Marquis’s “archy and mehitabel” stories, Archy is the cockroach, Mehitabel the cat. Archy was said to have written the stories at night on newspaper columnist Marquis’s typewriter. He wrote without capitals because he couldn’t reach the shift key. The stories were first collected in archy and mehitabel (1927).
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.
Henry James created Roderick Hudson, in the 1876 novel of the same name.
Raskolnikov murders the old pawnbroker Alena Ivanovna and her sister, Lizaveta in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Yes, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838) is based upon actual events. The adventures of J. N. Reynolds is about a stowaway who survived a mutiny, cannibalism, and other adventures.