Useless Facts on Classical Literature And Authors
Emily Dickinson wrote more than nine hundred poems, only four of which were published during her lifetime.
Gibbon spent twenty years writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Noah Webster spent thirty-six years writing his dictionary.
The Indian epic poem the Mahabhrata is eight times longer than the Lliad and the Odyssey combined.
There is no living descendant of William Shakespeare.
The great English poet John Keats died at the age of twenty-six.
Voltaire considered Shakespeare's works so deplorable that he referred to the Bard as “that drunken fool.”
All the proceeds earned from James M. Barrie's book Peter Pan were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past contains almost 1.5 million words.
Fagin, the sinister villain in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, was also the name of Dickens' best friend, Bob Fagin.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a 6,000 word epic poem when he was twelve years old.
Robert Louis Stevenson said that he had envisioned the entire story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a dream and simply recorded it the way he saw it. Stevenson claimed to be able to dream plots for his stories at will.
John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, wrote most of his famous book while in jail. He was imprisoned for twelve years for preaching without a license.
The original story of Alice in Wonderland was not known as Alice in Wonderland at all. It was called Alice's Adventures Under Ground and was illustrated by the author himself, Lewis Carroll—whose name was not Lewis Carroll, but Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Dodgson was a mathematics professor at Christ's Church, Oxford.
Shakespeare once wrote a play called What You Will. (Its alternative title: Twelfth Night.)
William Cullen Bryant, famous American critic, biographer, and civic leader, published a well-known satire on Thomas Jefferson at the age of thirteen. Before he was eighteen he had written his most famous poem, “To a Waterfowl.”
In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more than a hundred years before either moon was discovered.
Alexander Pope published “The Rape of the Lock” at age twenty-four. Browning wrote “Pauline” when he was twenty, Bryon wrote “Childe Harold” at twenty-four. Keats wrote “Endymion” at twenty-three.
The wife of the Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was the creator of the Frankenstein story. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly wrote the book Frankenstein in 1818, basing it on the writings of certain alchemists who claimed to have created a tiny human being called a homunculus, in a test tube.
In James M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the place where children go with Peter Pan is not called “Never-Never Land.” It is called “Neverland.”
The fairy tales “Puss in Boots,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” “Cinderella,” and many others were first written down by Charles Perrault, who also helped design part of the Louvre.
Treasure Island was created by Robert Louis Stevenson on a lark. Drawing a treasure map for his stepson on a rainy day, Stevenson was urged by the child to make up stories to go along with the drawings. Stevenson liked the stories so much he wrote them down, and these became the basis for his great novel.
Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story. Before he wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” the genre was totally unknown in English or American literature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his famous poem “Kubla Khan” directly from a dream. Coleridge was in the midst of writing down the visions he had seen in his dream when someone knocked on the door and he rose to let him in. On returning to his work, Coleridge found that he could not remember the rest of the dream. That is why “Kubla Khan” remains unfinished.
The original title of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions.
After completing his book on the French revolution, the great English historian Thomas Carlyle gave the manuscript to his friend John Stuart Mill to proofread. By mistake Mill's housemaid used the papers to kindle a fire and destroyed the entire manuscript. Undaunted, Carlyle sat down and, without benefit of notes (he had destroyed these himself), completely reconstructed and rewrote the book.