Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (1913-66), poet, fiction writer, and critic, was the model for Saul Bellow’s hard-drinking poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in the novel Humboldt’s Gift.
The name of the lover in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper for Lady Chatterley’s husband.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote ten novels in Russian before turning to English, including Laughter in the Dark (1938). His first novel written in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Nabokov (1899-1977) came to the United States in 1940 and was naturalized in 1945.
Jo March married an elderly German professor named Mr. Bhaer in Little Women.
Charlotte Bronte, the most famous of the Bronte sisters, wrote Jane Eyre in 1847. Emily Bronte, whose work is notable for its spirit of passion and rebellion, wrote Wuthering Heights in 1848.
Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
Rioting started during the first performance of the comedy The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907. The commotion was started by a reference to an undergarment.