While James I granted a pension to Ben Jonson in 1616, it was not until 1668 that the laureateship was created as a royal office.
John Dryden (1631-1700) was appointed by Charles II and held the office until 1688, when he was stripped of the laureateship by William and Mary because he had become a Catholic and had supported James II.
Henry Miller was married four times.
The hero of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855) belonged to the Mohawk tribe, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde didn’t exist, but there was a Scottish cabinetmaker named William Brodie who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s story. Brodie, a respected businessman by day, wore a mask and led a gang of robbers by night. Born in 1741, Brodie was hanged in 1788. The story interested Stevenson and inspired The Strange…
Selma LagerlOf of Sweden was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909. She is known for such works as Jerusalem (1901-02), a collection of stories about Swedish peasant life.
The only scenery in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a tree, leafless in Act 1, and with leaves in Act 2.
Scheherazade is the narrator of the Arabian Nights (c. 1450), who tells stories night after night to keep her husband, the Sultan Schahriah, from strangling her at dawn. Scheherazade tells her stories to her sister Dinarzade in the Sultan’s hearing.