Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple is comprised of letters from a black Southern woman named Celie to God, her sister, Nettie, and a missionary in Africa, and of Nettie’s letters to Celie.
Percy Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook Shelley committed suicide by drowning in 1816, two years after Shelley left her for Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley had eloped with the sixteen-year-old Harriet in 1811. Shelley himself died by drowning in a boating accident aboard his schooner, Ariel, in 1822.
Miss Lonelyhearts’ real name was never given.
The Lord High Everything in W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado (1885) was first called “Pooh-Bah”.
The first book published by Dr. Seuss was And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street. It was published in 1937 by Vanguard Press, after being rejected by twenty-three other publishers.
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.
The golliwog, a type of doll known as “the blackest gnome,” was invented by Florence K. Upton in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwog” (1895). More golliwog tales followed until 1909.