John Donne (1572?-1631) wrote, “Go and catch a falling star,/Get with child a mandrake root”, in the opening lines to the poem, “Song,” which was published posthumously, in 1633.
Joseph Conrad define his task as a writer as, “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).
Theodor Seuss Geisel known as Dr. Seuss died on September 24, 1991, at age eighty-seven. Dr. Seuss had written about fifty books that sold more than 200 million copies. His last book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go (1990), was still on the bestseller list when he died.
Merlin the sorcerer first appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (1137). This Latin prose work by the English chronicler also helped build the legend of Merlin’s protégé, King Arthur.
Italian author Carlo Collodi (a.k.a. Carlo Lorenzini) wrote The Adventures of Pinocchio, the popular tale of a puppet who comes to life.
At the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Washington Irving’s schoolmaster Ichabod Crane disappears after being hit by the Headless Horseman’s “head.”
Natty Bumppo’s Indian sidekick was Chingachgook. He appears in Cooper’s The Deer-slayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Pioneers (1823).