Beatrice was probably Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a noble Florentine family and wife of Simone de’ Bardi.
She died at the age of twenty-four on June 8,1290, more than two decades before the Divine Comedy was completed.
Dante fell in love with her when they were both children and dedicated most of his poetry to her.
The French author of Consuelo (1842), George Sand was born Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin.
These occupations of characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) refer to the following: summoner—an officer who summoned suspects before the ecclesiastical courts canon’s yeoman—an attendant of a canon; a canon was a clergyman associated with a cathedral or large church franklin—a prosperous country man of low birth manciple—a steward of a community of lawyers…
The first part of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is recognized as a comic masterpiece, but the second part never saw the light of day. Convinced by the radical priest Father Matthew Konstantinovsky that literature was sinful, Gogol (1809-52) burned the manuscript of Part Two in 1852. He died a few days later.
Ahab’s harpooneers in Moby Dick were Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo.
Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle (1963) invented ice-nine. Ice-nine is a form of water that freezes at 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit. When it is accidentally released into the ocean, it freezes the entire world. Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle (1963). Ice-nine is a form of water that freezes at 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit. When it…
The Broadway play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams was drawn from a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller, which Williams wrote while he was under contract as a screenwriter for MGM in the early 1940s.