Who wrote “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou”?
Twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam wrote “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” in his Rubaiyat, translated into English by Edward Fitz-Gerald in 1859.
Twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam wrote “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” in his Rubaiyat, translated into English by Edward Fitz-Gerald in 1859.
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…
The Italian religious epic Jerusalem Delivered, written in 1575 by Torquato Tasso (1544-95), concerns the First Crusade, in which European Christians fought to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims. The First Crusade lasted from 1095 to 1099.
John Newbery (1713-67) of England was one of the first publishers to publish books for children. The Newbery Medal, established in his name in 1921, is awarded each year for the best American children’s book.
John Berryman commit suicide on January 7, 1972. He jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi River. He was fifty-eight.
In a letter written in December 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas, poet John Keats first referred to “negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats considered this quality essential to a “Man of Achievement especially in literature.”
Mr. Yorick narrates Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, a character from Sterne’s earlier novel Tristram Shandy (1767) .