The people of Blefuscu, an island northeast of Lilliput, were the enemies of the Lilliputians.
The people there were as tiny and mean-spirited as the Lilliputians.
Swift meant Blefuscu to represent France, while Lilliput represented England.
The author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party in 1941.
The 1941 Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace was written by Joseph Kesselring. The 1946 movie adaptation was directed by Frank Capra.
In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus (c. 406 B.C.), the blinded Oedipus wanders by accident into the sacred grove of the furies at Colonus in Attica, about a mile northwest of Athens.
Milton’s masque Comus was first performed on Michaelmas Night (September 29), 1634, at Ludlow Castle to celebrate the Earl of Bridgewater’s becoming Lord President of Wales and the Marches. The Earl’s children enacted the roles of the Lady and her two brothers in the play.
George F. Babbitt, the lead character in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), is a real-estate dealer in Zenith, an average American city. He is married to Myra Babbitt; his children are named Verona and Ted.
The subtitle of Melville’s short story “Bartle by the Scrivener” is “A Story of Wall Street.”