FUN FACTS OF ENGLISH

1. Listen and Silent are spelt with same letters.

2. The word ‘QUEUE’ spells the same even if we remove the last 4 letters.
3. A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours.
4. ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ has all the letters of English Alphabet.
5. The most commonly used letter of English is e, followed by a.
6. The first book printed in English, in 1475, was The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye by
Englishman William Caxton.
7. The shortest, oldest, and most commonly used word is “I.”
8. English is the language of the air.
9. Girl used to mean small boy or girl.
10. The English language is said to be one of the happiest languages in the world – oh, and
the word 'happy' is used 3 times more often than the word 'sad'!
11. The first novel ever written on a typewriter was Tom Sawyer.
12. Dreamt’ is the only word in the English language to end with ‘mt’.
13. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
14. ‘Aloha’ is a Hawaiian word that means both hello and goodbye.
15. John Milton used 8,000 different words in his poem ‘Paradise Lost.’
16. The longest English word without a vowel is – rhythm.
17. The only 15 letter word that can be spelt without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
18. There are only four words in the English language which end in ‘dous’: tremendous,
horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
19. “FACETIOUS”is the only word that uses all the vowels.
20. Time is the most commonly used noun.
21. Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson”.
22. A Language dies every 14 days.
23. “I am.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
24. There are only four words in the English language which end in ‘dous’: tremendous,
horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
25. Ghosts appear only in 4 Shakespearean plays: Julius Caesar, Richard III, Hamlet and
Macbeth.
26. Microsoft founder Bill Gates bought ‘Codex Leicester’, one of Leonardo Di Vinci’s
scientific journals for a whopping $30.8 million in November 1994.
27. Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, tested chocolates for
Cadbury’s while he was at school.
28. Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembers of Things Past’ is the longest book in the world at
9,609,000 characters. The book is highly inspired by Proust’s personal experiences.
29. Lewis Carroll’s book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was banned in China as the book suggests
animals can talk and write just like humans, which according to the governor of Hunan,
China is “disastrous”.
30. ‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
31. ‘SWIMS’ upside down still looks like ‘SWIMS’.
32. The town of Hamelin, Germany famous for the legend of the rat-catching Pied Piper has
a Modern day Rat Problem due to the food left by tourists.
33. The name for Oz in the “Wizard of Oz” was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum,
looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence “Oz.”.
34. ‘Aloha’ is a Hawaiian word that means both hello and goodbye.
35. The longest English word without a vowel is – rhythm.
36. The Times (UK’s newspaper) of 22 August 1978 contained the most number of misprints
– about 97. In one story about the Pope, he was called “the Pop” throughout the article.
37. ‘The Mouse Trap’ by Agatha Christie is the longest-running play in history.
38. All of the roles in Shakespeare’s plays were originally acted by men and boys. In
England at that time, it wasn’t proper for females to appear on stage.
39. The original story from Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights begins, ‘Aladdin was a little
Chinese boy’.
40. John Milton used 8,000 different words in his poem ‘Paradise Lost.’.
41. In the original story, Sleeping beauty was raped by the prince and gave birth to 2
children. She woke up when a kid sucked on her finger.
42. Agatha Christie is the best selling novelist of all time.

44. The best selling and most widely distributed book of all time is the Bible.

46. The best selling refernce book is "Xinhua Zidian," a Chinese dictionary.

48. "Don Quixote" by Migel de Cervantes is the bestselling novel of all time.

50. J.K. Rowling was the first author to make a billion dollars from book sales.

52. Shakespeare is said to have invented about 2,000 words.

54. "Bookworm" and "bibliophile" are 2 words used to describe book-lovers.

56. A "tsundoku" is a person who buys more books than they will ever read.

58. Some of us love the smell of old books. This is called "bibliosmia".

60. Raymond Chandler invented the word "unputdownable" to describe a book.

62. Publishers rejected "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" 12 times.

64. Moby Dick was rejected for being "long and old fashioned".

66. "Irish Wine" by Dick Wimmer was rejected 162 times before it was published.

68. Beatrix Potter’s "Peter Rabbit" was rejected 6 times by publishers.

70. "First Impressions" was rejected, then published as "Pride and Prejudice".
72. George Eliot was a woman. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans.

74. Eric Blair chose the king's name and a river as his pen name: George Orwell.

76. Horror writer Stephen King also wrote under the name Richard Bachman.

78. JK Rowling published an adult novel under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

80. Agatha Christie published 6 romance novels as Mary Westmacott.

82. "The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger is banned in some US schools.

84. As is "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

86. "1984" by George Orwell was banned in the USSR and some US counties.

88. Alice in Wonderland was banned in China because it includes talking animals.

90. In 1960 Penguin were taken to court for publishing "Lady Chaterley's Lover".

92. The most expensive book cost $30.8 million! It's "Codex Leicester" by Di Vinci.

94. Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables" contains an 823 word sentence.

96. Charles Dickens slept facing north, thinking it would improve his writing.

98. The first novel written on a typewriter was "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain.

 John Steinbeck's first draught of "Of Mice and Men" was eaten by his dog.
 The longest novel is "Remembrance of Things Past" with 9,609,000 characters.

 The longest book title is made up of 3,777 words. There's no room for it here!

 The longest series is possibly "Guin Saga" which has over 100 volumes.

 The shortest novel is 40,000 words. Any shorter and it would be a novella.

 "The Dinosaur" by Augusto Monterroso is only 9 words long.

 "Pride goes before a fall" is a misquotation from the Bible, As is "Money is the root of
all evil".

 The Shakespeare quote "To gild the lily" is a misrepresentation of his words

 “Me Tarzan, You Jane” never appeared in any of the Tarzan books

 “Elementary, my dear Watson” never appears in the Sherlock Holmes stories

 David Walliams has won the Children's Book Award three times

 Established in 1919, the James Tait Black prize is the UK's oldest book award

 The Costa Book Awards (the Whitbread Literary Awards) began in 1971

 In 1975 there were 83 Booker Prize entries. Just 2 made it onto the shortlist

 The Nobel Prize for Literature has been won most often by French authors

 The classic "Bladerunner" is based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

 A poll on Goodreads voted the "Percy Jackson" series the worst adaptations

 142 minute film "Shawshank Redemption" is based on a 93 page story

 Charles Dickens is the most adapted author of all time

 The Grimm Brothers' "Cinderella" is much gorier than Disney's adaptation

 “Beowulf” is the first heroic epic poem in English literature during the Old English
period or the Anglo saxon period.
 John Milton when composed “Paradise lost” was blind.
 John Keats was a surgeon by profession.
 Joseph Conrad was a sailor by profession.
 The magnum opus of T.S Eliot i.e the “Wasteland” ends with the Sanskrit word “shantih
shantih shantih”.
 Lord Byron had a child with his step sister .
 George Bernard Shaw had a sexless marriage.
 Novel as a genre developed in the 18 th century.
 Printing developed in London in the hands of William Caxton.
 Shakespeare introduced the new sonnet form different from the sonnet form of Wyatt and
Surrey.
 Theatre developed inside the church and later it came outside the church and got famous .
 Shakespeare never went to university,he only went to a grammar school.
 The father of essays is Michel de Montaigne.
 The first novel in English literature was written by Samuel Richardson i.e “Pamela” or
“virtue rewarded”.
 “Kubla khan” is also known as the dream poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge because it is
believed that he composed the poem in his dream.
 “The bell jar” is the one and only novel composed by Sylvia Plath a month before her
suicide.
 ‘The stream of consciousness novels’ developed in the hands of James Joyce and also
Virgina Woolf.
 War Poets like Rupert Brooke romanticized warfare but Wilfred Owen portrayed the
hollowness and the futility of warfare.
 Scandinavian,french and Latin had influenced the development of English language and
English borrowed words from them which adds to the polish, refinement and makes
English language rich .
 Shakespeare and Milton are also known as the makers of English language because they
contributed words to English language. For eg “multitudinous” is the coinage by
Shakespeare and Milton was the first to use the word ‘space’ which meant “outer space”.
 American English and British English differ in meaning in some words like the word
“clerk" generally refers to a 'shop assistant' in American English .
 The use of ‘Fall’ for autumn , ‘Faucet’ for tap , 'Platter' for plate , ‘gotten’ for got, ‘bug’
for insect, ‘mad’ for angry are all examples of archaism which Americans are fond of
.(American English)
 In spelling American English often differ from British English in some cases like the
alphabet 'U' is dropped in words like Honour, colour, labour ( Honor, color, labor).
 Single consonant is used in place of two like traveler , cigarette ( traveller , cigarette) , -'er'
is substituted for 're' - centre , center ; theatre, theater .( American English)
 The alphabet ‘S’ is used in place of ‘C’ like defence, defense; offence , offense.( American
English)
 Verbless Novel Michel Thaler did the unthinkable. He wrote a novel titled 'Le Train de
Nulle' part. This french novel has 233 pages, but not even a single verb.
 Magistrate Henry Fielding, the writer of majestic prose,was a magistrate by profession.
His professional experience influenced Amelia, his last novel.
 novelist Anonymous. Jane Austen withheld her name from all her works during her
lifetime. The first edition of 'sense and sensibility ',was credited 'By a lady'. Her following
book was 'pride and prejudice ' and this work was credited to 'The Author of Sense and
Sensibility '.
 Novel without 'e' A novel published without the letter 'e' became a novelty. Gadsby, the
work of Ernest Vincent is the novel in question. The novel has 50,000 words but not a
single 'e'!
 A Writer Reads. Charles Dickens became the first well known author to give public
readings from his writings. His first reading was "A Christmas Carol ". Dickens read out
from his novella before a gathering of 2000 people in the English town of Birmingham.
 Highest Library. At the Tomorrow Square in Shanghai, stands the JW Marriott Hotel. And
on the 60th floor of the JW Marriott Hotel,is located "The world's highest library ". The
library stands 230.9 meters above the street level.
 Word Perfect. Gustave Flaubert was a writer who searched for perfection. There were
times when he spent weeks on a single page. This French realist influenced generations of
writers.
 Word Train. The longest sentence in French Literature can be found in "Les Miserables "
according to critics. The sentence has 823 words.
 Survival by Chance. Men of a Roman army invading Asia Minor discovered a treasure of
manuscripts in a pit. These were the writings of Aristotle. The army men brought the
manuscripts to General Sulla, who had them recopied in Rome. The works of Aristotle
had survived purely by chance.
 Chinese Cinderalla. The much loved story of cinderalla is not entirely original. It is
adapted from a similar story in a Chinese book. The Chinese book dates back to 850 AD.
 Finnegan's Wake, the novel by James Joyce has never been adequately interpreted. In
other words, nobody can agree on what the novel's about!
 Ernest Hemingway was dared to write the shortest novel possible. It has six words and
goes like this: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn"
 The shortest story ever told was written by a Guatemalan author, Augusto Monterroso.
"Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba ahí." (Translated: "Upon waking, the
dinosaur still lingered there."
 Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, used to have a (SPOILER AHEAD!) downer
ending. A friend of the author advised him to make it a happy ending in order to please
more readers. It worked! That's the novel we all read today.
 Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as two books. He had only written one, and a copycat
"fanfic" sequel emerged. To get back at the fake author for stealing his idea, Cervantes
resolved to write the second book, ten years after the first one was published. You might
notice the tone of the second is more serious and philosophical than the farcial first book...
 Michel Dansel, a French author who hated verbs, wrote Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train
from Nowhere) which is a FULL novel with no verbs!
 Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" fueled one of the earliest manifestations
of copycat suicides. Like the dejected lover, many young men not only wore the same
clothes, but also shot themselves to escape their sorrow.
 Daisy Ashford, an English author, wrote her first novel, Mr. Salteena's Plan, at age 9. She
lost the whole manuscript, but rediscovered it when she was 36. She edited out the
spelling mistakes and published a book that became quite a success. With a foreword by
JM Barrie!
 Speaking of which, JM Barrie "invented" the name "Wendy" for the story of Peter Pan.
(It's actually short for Gwendolyn)

 Virginia Woolf was the granddaughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.

 Aldous Huxley was the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold.

 Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, lived next door to Mark
Twain.

 Evelyn Waugh’s first wife’s name was Evelyn. They were known as ‘He-Evelyn’ and
‘She-Evelyn’.

 Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, married Leon Trotsky’s

secretary.

 In 1951, William Burroughs accidentally shot his common-law wife Joan Vollmer dead
at a party during a drunken game of ‘William Tell’.

 Samuel Johnson had only three pupils enrol at the school he opened in the 1730s.
However, one of those three was future actor David Garrick.

 Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.

 Vladimir Nabokov had a ‘genitalia cabinet’ in which he kept his collection of male blue
butterfly genitalia. It’s now housed at Harvard.
 In 1974, Arthur C. Clarke predicted the internet of the year 2001.

 Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to propose a solution to the cosmological problem
known as Olbers’ paradox.

 Lewis Carroll once stayed up all night composing this anagram of British Prime Minister
William Ewart Gladstone: ‘Wild agitator, means well’.

 Stieg Larsson said that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was based on what Pippi
Longstocking would be like as an adult.

 Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (1651), who famously described human life as
‘nasty, brutish and short’, lived to be 91 years old.

 In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad. At the very last minute the
sentence was commuted to four years’ hard labour.

 The author of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, was one of the writers on the 1990s
children’s TV show Clarissa Explains It All.

 Alexandre Dumas fought his first duel at age 23. During the course of the duel, his
trousers fell down.

 Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined the army under the name Silas Tomkyn
Cumberbatch.

 Before settling on the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens signed his
writings with the pseudonym ‘Josh’.

 Before finding fame as a novelist, The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown was a pop
singer. One of his solo albums was called Angels and Demons.

 Detective fiction author Dashiell Hammett started out as a private detective; his first case
was to track down a stolen Ferris wheel.

 Washington Irving, who wrote both ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow’, suffered from insomnia.

 T. E. Lawrence lost the manuscript for his masterpiece The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom at Reading railway station. He had to rewrite it from notes.

 Jean-Dominique Bauby ‘dictated’ his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,
about his life following a stroke, by blinking his left eyelid.

 Stella Gibbons wrote much of her novel Cold Comfort Farm while commuting to
work on the London Underground.
 Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk. He claimed that he needed the scent
of their decay to help him write.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald once danced on the lawn of publishers Doubleday to attract Joseph
Conrad; the caretaker noticed him and had him removed.

 Franz Kafka would attend nudist camps but refused to drop his trousers; he was known by
others as ‘The Man in the Swimming Trunks’.

 When Marcel Proust and James Joyce met in 1922, they spent dinner talking about their
ailments before admitting they hadn’t read each other’s work.

 When he worked for Faber, T. S. Eliot liked to seat visiting authors in chairs with
whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars.

 Mrs Beeton was only 21 when she began her Book of Household Management,
which sold 2 million copies in its first decade. She died aged 28.

 Noel Coward claimed he began every day by checking the obituary column in The
Times; if he wasn’t listed there, he could get down to work.
 Agatha Christie disliked her creation Hercule Poirot, calling him ‘a detestable,
bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’.

 Enid Blyton’s 1946 Gay Story Book included tales called ‘Let’s Play Worms’ and
‘Dame Poke-Around’.

 A young Samuel Johnson was turned down for a teaching job because it was feared his
‘way of distorting his face’ would scare the pupils.

 Molière died after collapsing on stage while acting in one of his own plays – ironically, he
was playing the role of the hypochondriac.

 William Makepeace Thackeray was so moved by the novel Jane Eyre that he broke
down in tears in front of his butler.

 The first recorded reference to anyone in England having a cup of tea is in Samuel
Pepys’ diary on 25 September 1660.

 Charles Dickens gave himself a number of nicknames, including ‘The Sparkler of

Albion’, ‘The Inimitable’, ‘Revolver’, and ‘Resurrectionist’.

 On his marriage document in 1582, William Shakespeare’s name was spelled ‘William
Shagspeare’.

 J. D. Salinger once dated Oona, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, but she left
him for Charlie Chaplin whom she later married.
 Virginia Woolf was a keen cricketer and was known by her family as ‘the demon bowler’.

 Mickey Spillane ordered 50,000 copies of his 1952 novel Kiss Me, Deadly to be
destroyed when the comma was left out of the title.

 Thomas Hardy’s only acting role was a walk-on part in a pantomime at Covent Garden.

 American lexicographer Noah Webster was T. S. Eliot’s great-uncle.

 The first US edition of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale was published with the
title ‘You Asked for It’.

 The phrase ‘dark horse’ comes from Benjamin Disraeli’s 1831 novel The Young
Duke, in which such a horse is the surprise winner at the races.
 Biggles author ‘Captain’ W. E. Johns never attained the rank of Captain – he was only a
Flying Officer.

 Neil Gaiman’s first book was a biography of Duran Duran, published in 1984.

 Roald Dahl’s school report read: ‘I have never met anybody who so persistently writes
words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.’

 Ian Fleming was Christopher Lee’s step-cousin.

 C. S. Lewis coined the word ‘verbicide’ to denote the killing of a word or the distortion of
its original meaning.

 Writer of westerns Louis L’Amour received 200 rejections before he was published. His
novels have now sold 320 million copies worldwide.

 In 1862, novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who coined the phrase ‘the pen is mightier
than the sword’, was offered the throne of Greece.

 Modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wore mourning dress to her first wedding and left
her husband on their wedding night.

 Virginia Woolf was the granddaughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.

 Aldous Huxley was the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold.

 Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, lived next door to Mark
Twain.

 Evelyn Waugh’s first wife’s name was Evelyn. They were known as ‘He-Evelyn’ and
‘She-Evelyn’.
 Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, married Leon Trotsky’s
secretary.

 In 1951, William Burroughs accidentally shot his common-law wife Joan Vollmer dead
at a party during a drunken game of ‘William Tell’.

 Samuel Johnson had only three pupils enrol at the school he opened in the 1730s.
However, one of those three was future actor David Garrick.

 Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.

 Vladimir Nabokov had a ‘genitalia cabinet’ in which he kept his collection of male blue
butterfly genitalia. It’s now housed at Harvard.

 In 1974, Arthur C. Clarke predicted the internet of the year 2001.

 Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to propose a solution to the cosmological problem
known as Olbers’ paradox.

 Lewis Carroll once stayed up all night composing this anagram of British Prime Minister
William Ewart Gladstone: ‘Wild agitator, means well’.

 Stieg Larsson said that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was based on what Pippi
Longstocking would be like as an adult.

 Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (1651), who famously described human life as
‘nasty, brutish and short’, lived to be 91 years old.

 In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad. At the very last minute the
sentence was commuted to four years’ hard labour.

 If you’re enjoying these facts, we have hundreds more in our book, The Secret
Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History. You can discover
more about the book in the video below.

 Playwright Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap.

 The author of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, was one of the writers on the 1990s
children’s TV show Clarissa Explains It All.

 Alexandre Dumas fought his first duel at age 23. During the course of the duel, his
trousers fell down.

 Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined the army under the name Silas Tomkyn
Cumberbatch.
 Before settling on the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens signed his
writings with the pseudonym ‘Josh’.

 Before finding fame as a novelist, The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown was a pop
singer. One of his solo albums was called Angels and Demons.

 Detective fiction author Dashiell Hammett started out as a private detective; his first case
was to track down a stolen Ferris wheel.

 Washington Irving, who wrote both ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow’, suffered from insomnia.

 T. E. Lawrence lost the manuscript for his masterpiece The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom at Reading railway station. He had to rewrite it from notes.

 Jean-Dominique Bauby ‘dictated’ his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,
about his life following a stroke, by blinking his left eyelid.

 Stella Gibbons wrote much of her novel Cold Comfort Farm while commuting to
work on the London Underground.

 Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk. He claimed that he needed the scent
of their decay to help him write.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald once danced on the lawn of publishers Doubleday to attract Joseph
Conrad; the caretaker noticed him and had him removed.

 Franz Kafka would attend nudist camps but refused to drop his trousers; he was known by
others as ‘The Man in the Swimming Trunks’.

 When Marcel Proust and James Joyce met in 1922, they spent dinner talking about their
ailments before admitting they hadn’t read each other’s work.

 When he worked for Faber, T. S. Eliot liked to seat visiting authors in chairs with
whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars.

 Mrs Beeton was only 21 when she began her Book of Household Management,
which sold 2 million copies in its first decade. She died aged 28.

 Noel Coward claimed he began every day by checking the obituary column in The
Times; if he wasn’t listed there, he could get down to work.
 Agatha Christie disliked her creation Hercule Poirot, calling him ‘a detestable,
bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’.
 Enid Blyton’s 1946 Gay Story Book included tales called ‘Let’s Play Worms’ and
‘Dame Poke-Around’.

 A young Samuel Johnson was turned down for a teaching job because it was feared his
‘way of distorting his face’ would scare the pupils.

 Molière died after collapsing on stage while acting in one of his own plays – ironically, he
was playing the role of the hypochondriac.

 William Makepeace Thackeray was so moved by the novel Jane Eyre that he broke
down in tears in front of his butler.

 The first recorded reference to anyone in England having a cup of tea is in Samuel
Pepys’ diary on 25 September 1660.

 Charles Dickens gave himself a number of nicknames, including ‘The Sparkler of

Albion’, ‘The Inimitable’, ‘Revolver’, and ‘Resurrectionist’.

 On his marriage document in 1582, William Shakespeare’s name was spelled ‘William
Shagspeare’.

 J. D. Salinger once dated Oona, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, but she left
him for Charlie Chaplin whom she later married.

 Virginia Woolf was a keen cricketer and was known by her family as ‘the demon bowler’.

 Mickey Spillane ordered 50,000 copies of his 1952 novel Kiss Me, Deadly to be
destroyed when the comma was left out of the title.

 Thomas Hardy’s only acting role was a walk-on part in a pantomime at Covent Garden.

 American lexicographer Noah Webster was T. S. Eliot’s great-uncle.

 The first US edition of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale was published with the
title ‘You Asked for It’.

 The phrase ‘dark horse’ comes from Benjamin Disraeli’s 1831 novel The Young
Duke, in which such a horse is the surprise winner at the races.
 Biggles author ‘Captain’ W. E. Johns never attained the rank of Captain – he was only a
Flying Officer.

 Neil Gaiman’s first book was a biography of Duran Duran, published in 1984.

 Roald Dahl’s school report read: ‘I have never met anybody who so persistently writes
words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.’
 Ian Fleming was Christopher Lee’s step-cousin.

 C. S. Lewis coined the word ‘verbicide’ to denote the killing of a word or the distortion of
its original meaning.

 Writer of westerns Louis L’Amour received 200 rejections before he was published. His
novels have now sold 320 million copies worldwide.

 In 1862, novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who coined the phrase ‘the pen is mightier
than the sword’, was offered the throne of Greece.

 Modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wore mourning dress to her first wedding and left
her husband on their wedding night.

 In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens coined the word ‘growlery’ for a place to
retire to when you’re feeling ‘out of humour’.

 The only fan letter Richard Dawkins has ever written was to Douglas Adams; to his
delight, he got one back.

 One of Geoffrey Chaucer’s earliest poems was an acrostic which he wrote for people to
use when praying.

 When Sarah Kane’s death was announced in 1999, there was a minute’s silence on
German radio.

 Roald Dahl planned to write a third Charlie Bucket book, Charlie in the White
House; he died before he could complete it.

 Owing to failing eyesight, James Joyce wrote much of his novel Finnegans Wake in
crayon on pieces of cardboard.

 Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to My Socks’ contains the lines ‘what is good is doubly good when
it is a matter of two socks made of wool in winter.

 J. R. R. Tolkien was known to dress up as an axe-wielding Anglo-Saxon warrior and

chase his astonished neighbour down the street.

 Michael Bond bought Paddington Bear in 1956; he felt sad for the bear as it was the only
toy left on the shop’s shelves on Christmas Eve.

 James Joyce’s last words were reportedly ‘Does nobody understand?’

 Truman Capote wouldn’t begin or end a piece of work on a Friday, and would change
hotel rooms if its phone number involved the number 13.

 In Florida’s Key West, there’s an annual Ernest Hemingway Lookalike Contest.

 When he was six, Roald Dahl made his mother take him to meet Beatrix Potter. Potter,
who disliked children, told them both to ‘buzz off.’

 J. K. Rowling came up with the names for the houses at Hogwarts in Harry Potter while
she was on a plane. She jotted the names down on a sick-bag.

 For 164 years, Anne Brontë’s gravestone gave her age at the time of her death as 28; she
was actually 29.

 Dr Seuss included the word ‘contraceptive’ in a draft of his children’s book Hop on
Pop to make sure his publisher was paying attention.
 William Faulkner was born Falkner; according to one story, the ‘u’ was the result of a
typesetting error Faulkner didn’t bother to correct.

 When staying in hotels, Hans Christian Andersen always carried a coil of rope with him in
case he needed to escape from a fire.

 One publisher rejected Mary Higgins Clark’s novel Journey Back to Love with the
words: ‘We found the heroine as boring as her husband did.’

 Only ten people attended D. H. Lawrence’s funeral. One of the mourners was Aldous
Huxley.

 Daniel Defoe’s numerous pen names included Jeffrey Sing-Song, Obadiah Blue Hat,
Betty Blueskin, Penelope Firebrand, and the Man in the Moon.

 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges at

the Salem witch trials.

 Alexandre Dumas’ name at birth was Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie.

 In 1912, Ambrose Bierce proposed an early emoticon, the snigger point, written as \___/!
and designed to mimic ‘a smiling mouth.’

 Quentin Crisp’s real name was Denis Pratt.

 Samuel Johnson deliberately misspelled the name of the publisher of his

poem London so that readers would think it was a pirated copy.

 Robert Louis Stevenson legally gave his birthday away to a little girl.

 Jack Kerouac typed up his novel On the Road on one continuous roll of paper that
was 120 feet long.

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow coined the phrases ‘ships that pass in the night’ and
‘footprints on the sands of time’.
 Rudyard Kipling referred to his friend, the writer and designer William Morris, as ‘Deputy
Uncle Topsy’.

 T. S. Eliot was a huge fan of Groucho Marx; he wrote the comedian a fan letter and kept a
picture of him on his wall.

 Maurice Sendak based the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are on his Polish
relatives who lived with him after escaping the Holocaust.

 One of Bill Bryson’s first books, from 1985, was about ‘unusual, unspoiled, and
infrequently visited spots in 16 European countries’.

 Poet William Ernest Henley was the inspiration for Long John Silver and the father of
the girl who inspired the character Wendy Darling.

 In 1871, Mark Twain invented one of the first bra straps.

 Emily Brontë once had to put out her brother, Branwell, when he set fire to his bedclothes.

 J. M. Barrie set up a celebrity cricket team featuring G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan

Doyle, Jerome K. Jerome, A. A. Milne, and H. G. Wells.

 There is an asteroid named after Kurt Vonnegut.

 Marlon Brando was a huge fan of Toni Morrison; he would often call her up and read
passages of her own novels which he particularly enjoyed.

 There is a life-size android version of the SF writer Philip K. Dick, built in 2005 by David
Hanson. It has been christened ‘Robo-Dick’.

 Sylvia Plath committed suicide in an apartment in which W. B. Yeats had once lived.

 The US sitcom I Dream of Jeannie was created by Sidney Sheldon, who went on to
become the seventh bestselling fiction writer of all time.

 William Wordsworth went to the same school as Fletcher Christian, the man who led the
mutiny on the Bounty in 1789.

 The first known person to use the word ‘outsider’ was Jane Austen, in a letter of 1800.

 Jane Austen, one of England’s finest novelists, almost died at the age of seven. Both Jane
and her sister Cassandra caught diphtheria while in Oxford. Thankfully, Jane’s cousin
Jane Cooper sent a letter to Jane’s mother who rushed to her two daughters with an herbal
remedy.
 Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was terrible at finances. Although he paid his
debts on time, he would often overdraft upwards of £7,500. This is all the more ironic
considering Carroll was a mathematics scholar at Oxford.

 Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus when she was 18
years old. It was published only two years later.

 Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables wasn’t only popular with 19th century Parisians. This
massive novel was one of the most widely read books amongst American soldiers in the
Civil War.

 Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once attended a lecture given by American icon
Mark Twain. The subject of Twain’s talk, however, had nothing to do with the intricacies
of the human psyche. Twain’s central lecture topic was about a watermelon he stole as a
child

 Irish author James Joyce loved Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s plays so much that he
learned basic Norwegian just to send Ibsen a fan letter. In addition to Norwegian, Joyce
was fluent in French, Italian, Latin, and German. He even uses words in more obscure
languages like Old English, Gaelic, Provençal, and Swahili in his most difficult novel
Finnegan’s Wake.

 Mark Twain was the next-door neighbor of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Hartford,
Connecticut.

 George Eliot was actually a woman. Mary Ann Evans wrote under this pen name because
women authors were not as highly regarded as men. As George Eliot, Evans wrote several
novels considered among the best of all time.

 Not just a world-famous author, Vladimir Nabokov was also a serious lepidopterologist,
or studier of butterflies. He was a Comparative Zoology research fellow at Harvard, where
much of his butterfly collection remains today.

 Before he made it as a writer, Salman Rushdie wrote copy for Ogilvy & Mather. He came
up with several famous campaigns, including “naughty, but nice” and “irresistibubble!”

 Virginia Woolf (author of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One’s Own)
was related by marriage to William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair.
William’s daughter, Minie, was the first wife of Virginia’s father.
 Cormac McCarthy wrote with the same typewriter for more than 50 years. When it broke,
he auctioned it off to raise proceeds for the Sante Fe institute. It sold for over $250,000 in
2009.

 Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien worked as both a scholar of languages and on
the Oxford English Dictionary before writing his bestselling novels.He researched and
explained the etymology of words starting with W. Known words of his include “waggle”
and “walrus.” For a man of such erudition, it’s somewhat odd that he consistently told
reporters “cellar door” was the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Who
knows; perhaps it takes a PhD in Old Norse to understand.

 William Shakespeare‘s legacy survives not only in his many plays, but also in his
contributions to the English language. Did you know these phrases originally came from
Shakespeare?

Dead as a doornail
Fair play
All of a sudden
In a pickle
Night owl
Wear your heart on your sleeve
Star-crossed lovers
Off with his head
Green-eyed monster

 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of the Sherlock Holmes series, had a very public
friendship with master illusionist Harry Houdini. However, once Houdini heard that Doyle
believed in spiritualism and thought Houdini had real magical powers, the friendship
swiftly ended.

 American author William Faulkner wrote the outline to one of his novels on the walls of
his writing office in Oxford, Mississippi. Visitors to Faulkner’s Rowan Oak can still see
the author’s hand-written notes for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Fable on these
walls.

 Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, helped start a Transcendental

commune near Boston in 1841. However, Hawthorne left this commune a few months
later after he found it difficult to write with all the blisters he got from cutting straw and
shoveling manure. His lesser-known novel The Blithedale Romance recounts this
experience.
 Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe tried his hand at many unsuccessful business
ventures before he became a well-known pamphleteer and novelist. One of the weirdest
things he ever tried to sell was perfume made from the secretions of cats’ butts.

 Boris Pasternak, the Russian writer behind Doctor Zhivago, was the first author in history
to refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature. A few months after Pasternak was awarded the
prize in 1958, he formally refused the award fearing that it would cause the Soviet
government to arrest him or his family. It wasn’t until 1989 that Pasternak’s son collected
the award in Sweden for his father.

 French novelist Stendhal has a clinically recognized disease named after him: Stendhal
syndrome. Symptoms of this disease include fainting, shortness of breath, and heart
palpitations while viewing exquisite art. Stendhal’s name was chosen for this disease
because he almost passed out after seeing Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce.

 Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë certainly had a faithful pooch! Her dog, named
Keeper, actually followed Brontë’s coffin to her gravesite in 1848 and was said to
whimper by Emily’s room for weeks after her burial.

 Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of literature’s first prominent vegans. He
was persuaded to start this diet after he read the work of Dr. William Lambe and John
Frank Newton, both of whom wrote the first tracts in the English language advocating a
vegan lifestyle. Shelley also wrote pamphlets of his own advocating veganism.

 Romantic legend Lord Byron always traveled with his dozens of animals. Just a few of the
pets that made it from Byron’s English estate to Venice include ten horses, three monkeys,
three peacocks, eight dogs, five cats, one crane, one falcon, one eagle, and one crow.

 John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, had a huge influence on America’s Founding
Fathers. His political pamphlet Areopagitica, which argued in favor of the freedom of the
press, was a key influence on the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

 Before Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges was celebrated for his fiction, he earned a
living by writing advertisements for yogurt. Hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere, right?

 Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell bought a home in Hampshire without telling her
husband. Unfortunately, Gaskell had a severe heart attack and died in this house in
November of 1865 while she was having tea with her daughters. Gaskell’s husband was
doubly shocked: first that his wife had died and second that she bought a secret house.
 When Victor Hugo was running behind on his deadline for The Hunchback of Notre
Dame, he locked himself in his room with nothing but a shawl, paper, and a pen. He did
this so he wouldn’t get distracted from finishing his work, despite the fact that it was
freezing outside his home.

 Emily Dickinson was one of the most reclusive poets in American literary history. From
the 1850s till her death, Dickinson mainly stayed within her Amherst family home and
only went outside to tend to the garden. She didn’t even leave her upstairs bedroom to
attend her father’s funeral downstairs.

 19th century French short story writer Guy de Maupassant was one of many Parisian
intellectuals who hated the Eiffel Tower. Maupassant often ate lunch inside the tower’s
restaurant just to avoid seeing the Eiffel Tower’s profile.

 Russian author Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his major novels on index cards.
Nabokov believed this method of writing helped him figure out the best way to structure
his plots. He even kept a pack of cards under his pillows at night so he could quickly write
down any ideas that came into his head.

 Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, only wrote while reclining on a sofa. He wrote
in pencil with one hand and used his hand to smoke a cigarette, sip a cup of coffee, or pour
a sherry.

 Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle lent his first draft of The French Revolution to friend and
fellow philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1835. When Carlyle returned to pick up his
manuscript in London, Mill told Carlyle the document accidentally burned. Amazingly,
Carlyle wrote the entire 800-page text again and published it to great acclaim in 1837.

 Before Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, she worked as a Civil War nurse in
Washington, D.C. Alcott recorded her experiences tending to soldiers in her first
bestselling work Hospital Sketches (1863). Unfortunately, Alcott contracted typhoid and
was “treated” with mercury afterwards, which led to Alcott’s untimely death in 1888.

 Although English poet John Donne was the great-nephew of Catholic martyr Sir Thomas
More, he became one of London’s most famous (and feared) Protestant ministers. Before
he died in 1631, John Donne commissioned a statue of himself and had it placed in Saint
Paul’s Cathedral. This John Donne bust is the only original statue in St. Paul’s that
survived the Great Fire of London in 1666.
 Authors Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton both hated James Joyce’s Ulysses with a
passion. After reading the work for the first time, Woolf said, “I don’t believe that
[Joyce’s] method…means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the
thoughts between dashes.” Wharton was even harsher in her denunciation of Joyce’s
novel, calling it a “turgid welter of pornography.”

 Famous Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote most of his epic poem Marmion while on
horseback. Scott was a member of the Light Horse Volunteers, which were preparing for a
possible French invasion of the British Isles. Most likely Scott drew inspiration from the
horsemen he saw around him in Marmion‘s description of the 1513 Battle of Flodden.

 The obscure German poet Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann (1737 – 1805) is better known today
for his intense hatred of the letter “R” than his actual poetry. Burmann so hated the letter
“R” that he refused to use it in his poetic work and in daily conversation.

 Arnold Bennett, the author of The Old Wives’ Tale and Clayhanger, has an omelette
named after him. The omelette, which consists of cream, Parmesan cheese, and smoked
haddock, was invented at London’s Savoy Hotel where Bennett often stayed. You can still
order an “Omelette Arnold Bennett” at the Savoy Hotel today.

 When one Booker Prize judge finished Canadian author Margaret Atwood‘s The Year Of
The Flood, he hurled the novel across the room in a rage. Eyewitnesses say he threw the
book so hard that it actually dented a wall. But don’t feel too bad for Atwood; she had
already won the 2000 Booker Prize for her novel The Blind Assassin.

 When asked where she came up with the plots for her famous murder mysteries, Agatha
Christie said she liked to think out her stories while eating apples and relaxing in a warm
bath. As of today, Christie remains the bestselling murder mystery novelist of all time, so
her method obviously worked!

 18th century poet Alexander Pope has the most popular poetic quote according to Google
Analytics. The award-winning quote, which has over 14.8 million hits on Google, comes
from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” Rounding out
the top three are William Ernest Henley’s “I am the master of my fate,” and William
Wordsworth’s “The child is father of the man.

 While poet Sylvia Plath is better known for Ariel and The Bell Jar, she also wrote a
popular collection of children’s rhymes that were published posthumously as The Bed
Book. The original printed version of The Bed Book featured illustrations by Quentin
Blake, the award-winning artist behind almost all the illustrations in Roald Dahl’s books.
 Irish novelist James Joyce was one of world literature’s most famous astraphobics. In case
you didn’t already know, astrophobia refers to an intense fear of thunder and lightning.
Biographers believe Joyce developed this fear when his Catholic teachers told him thunder
was a sign of God’s wrath.

 Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, formally
gave away his birthday to an American girl while he was living in Samoa. The reason he
did this was because the young girl, A. H. Ide, had her birthday on Christmas, so she
didn’t get as many presents as her friends

 Hanson Robotics created a life-size android of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick in 2005. The
life-like robot has won numerous accolades in the tech industry. You can check out videos
of this intelligent android-author on YouTube.

 Classical music lovers probably already know that novelist Aurore Dupin (better known as
George Sand) was the lover of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. In addition to Chopin,
Sand had relationships with the playwright Alfred de Musset and the short story writer
Prosper Mérimée. Before she embarked on these famous romantic relations, Sand was
married to François Casimir Dudevant and bore him two children.

 There are many eerie parallels between John Brunner‘s 1964 novel Stand on Zanzibar and
the current world. This novel, which is set in 2010, predicted the rise of China, the
formation of the European Union, overpopulation, Viagra, and even had a president
named Obomi!

 Most novelists have some pretty odd ways of getting “inspired,” but British novelist D. H.
Lawrence‘s method was pretty extreme…even for a writer. Lawrence would actually
climb mulberry trees totally naked to help stimulate his imagination. Well, whatever
works, right?

 The Anglican Church honored Victorian poet Christian Rossetti with her very own Feast
Day on the second Sunday of Easter. Rossetti is well known for her devotional verses,
especially her Christmas poems. British composer Gustav Holst actually set Rossetti’s “In
The Bleak Midwinter” to music.

 American author Ernest Hemingway once stole a urinal from the bar Sloppy Joe’s and
brought it to his Key West home. He argued that he had “pissed away” enough money in
this bar that he deserved to own the urinal. Today, visitors can still see this famed urinal,
which was soon transformed into a garden fountain.
 Candide author Voltaire helped spread the story of Sir Isaac Newton getting hit on the
head with an apple. Voltaire wasn’t the first to write about how Newton came up with his
theory of gravity, but his account in 1727’s “Essay on Epic Poetry” is one of the most
famous versions. Although Voltaire (real name François-Marie Arouet) greatly admired
Newton’s work, the two great Enlightenment thinkers never met.

 In 1886, science fiction legend Jules Verne was almost killed by his nephew Gaston. Only
one of Gaston’s two bullets hit Verne in the left shin, which resulted in a lifelong limp.
Police quickly arrested Gaston and locked him away in a mental institution.

 American playwright Eugene O’Neill was born in a hotel room in New York and died in a
hotel room in Boston. His famous last words were, “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel
room – and God damn it – died in a hotel room.”

 Many film critics believe sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin‘s novels were the main sources
of inspiration for the 2009 blockbuster Avatar. In particular, critics see stark parallels
between Avatar and Le Guin’s novella The Word for World Is Forest. Fans of James
Cameron’s epic film should really give this short book a read-through.

 Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan, worked as a pencil-sharpener salesman before he

tried his hand at fiction. Indeed, Burroughs only started writing at the age of 36 to support
his wife and two children.

 Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett was close friends with the wrestler André the Giant.
André’s father, Boris Rousimoff, actually helped Beckett build his farm in northern Paris.
In return for this favor, Beckett agreed to drive the young André into school every day.

 The great Swiss-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a key contributor to Denis
Diderot‘s first French Encyclopedia. Rousseau almost exclusively wrote entries on
subjects related to music. Indeed, Rousseau was so fond of music that he actually
composed his own opera, The Village Soothsayer, in 1752.

 DC Comics didn’t invent the nickname “Gotham City.” Believe it or not, “Rip Van
Winkle” author Washington Irving first used this term to describe New York in an 1807
periodical. Irving apparently stole the nickname from a village in Nottinghamshire,
England
 The city Pippa Passes in eastern Kentucky was named after Victorian poet Robert
Browning‘s verse drama of the same name. Locals decided to change the city’s name from
“Carney” to “Pippa Passes” after they received financial assistance from the Browning
Society in the 1920s.

 The Hound of Heaven poet Francis Thompson is listed as a Jack the Ripper suspect.
Although there’s no physical evidence to back up this strange claim, independent
researchers say the imagery in Thompson’s poetry and his background in medical school
are valid grounds for suspicion.

 Charles Perrault, the French author behind classic fairy tales like Cinderella, persuaded
King Louis XIV to build 39 fountains in the Gardens of Versailles as a tribute to Aesop’s
fables. It took workers only five years (1672 to 1677) to complete this remarkable feat of
engineering. Besides Cinderella, Perrault is responsible for tales like Bluebeard, Little Red
Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty.

 Although lesser known today, the temperance novel Franklin Evans was one of Walt
Whitman‘s most commercially successful works during his lifetime. The great American
poet wrote this novel at the start of his career strictly for cash. He later admitted that he
penned this work in a drunken stupor over a period of three days.

 Colin Dexter, author of the popular Inspector Morse novels, said the most common
question he got from fans was about the meaning of the term “boustrophedon” in one of
his novels. In case you were wondering, boustrophedon refers to an ancient style of
writing in which the lines of text alternate from left to right and then from right to left.
Dexter was a Classics major and loved filling his detective novels with Ancient Greek,
Latin, and English literature.

 Speaking of Colin Dexter, it’s impossible not to think of Oxford, which is affectionately
known as “The City of Dreaming Spires.” Few people know that it was Victorian poet
Matthew Arnold who coined this phrase to describe Oxford. Just like Dexter, Arnold
studied Classics at the University of Oxford.

 Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said he was inspired to write fiction after attending a
baseball game at Jingu Stadium. Even though he had never written a novel before,
Murakami intuitively knew he could write a great story as he watched Dave Hilton bat a
double. He started writing Hear the Wild Sing that very night.

 Before he seriously began writing, French author Michel Houellebecq studied to become a
farmer…only to discover that he didn’t want to go into agriculture. Shortly after earning
 his agronomy degree, Houellebecq worked on computers for the French government. He
only began to earn a living as a writer once The Elementary Particles was published in
1998.

 After Song of Solomon author Toni Morrison‘s house burned down, she spent hours on
the phone with fellow author Maxine Hong Kingston trying to process the loss. Kingston
also lost one of her homes to a fire.

 American author Cormac McCarthy admitted that he sent his first novel to Random House
only because he didn’t know any other publishing houses. Amazingly, McCarthy has been
able to sell all of his novels from the 1960s onwards without the help of an agent

 As a souvenir from his trip to the Middle East, French author Gustave Flaubert brought
home a mummy’s foot and kept it on his working desk. Historians note that it was actually
quite common for wealthy 19th century travelers to bring body parts from mummies as
souvenirs.

 Beat author William S. Burroughs‘s novel Naked Lunch was supposed to be called Naked
Lust. Burroughs decided to change the novel’s title after fellow Beat Jack Kerouac
mispronounced the original title.

 Both American writers Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane were born on the same day:
July 21st, 1899. Unfortunately, both of these troubled artists also died by their own hands.

 While he was writing Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison supported himself as a freelance
photographer. He also earned some money repairing, building, and installing audio
systems.

 Although the Italian writer Italo Calvino is highly praised for his fantasy novels, his
parents suppressed literary studies in favor of scientific learning. Both of Calvino’s
parents were science professors. Indeed, Calvino’s father was a well-respected botanist
who grew some Italy’s first avocados.

 The influential British authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day:
November 22nd, 1963. That was also the fateful day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
All three of these coincidental deaths inspired American author Peter Kreeft to write the
novel Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F.
Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.
 Sci-fi author H. G. Wells worked as a math teacher shortly before publishing his iconic
The Time Machine. Wells’s most famous student was none other than Winnie The Pooh
author A. A. Milne. Milne’s father, John Milne, was the schoolmaster at the Henley House
school and employed Wells between 1889 and 1890.

 While we’re on the topic of important British writers educating future English authors,
Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) was once the pupil of Aldous Huxley. Huxley
taught Orwell French at Eton College starting in 1917.

 Medieval French poet François Villon murdered a priest and later stole from Paris’s
Collège de Navarre. Although he was sentenced to be hanged for his criminal actions, it
appears Villon’s sentence changed to exile. Some scholars believe Villon fled to England
in his final years, but nobody actually knows what happened to him after 1463.

 Wystan Hugh Auden (often referred to as W. H. Auden) drew a great deal from his
father’s medical knowledge and his mother’s Anglican faith in his poetry. Indeed, Auden
is credited with being the first serious English writer to use the language of clinical
psychiatry in verse.

 Literary scholars don’t know much about The Faerie Queene author Edmund Spencer‘s
first wife Machabyas Childe. All we know is that Spencer married Childe in 1579 in
London’s St. Margaret’s Church and that Childe died before 1594. We do know a bit more
about Spencer’s second wife Elizabeth Boyle.

 Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card lists feeding local wildlife on his North Carolina
patio as one of his hobbies. Besides birds, chipmunks, and squirrels, Card also likes to
feed raccoons and possums.

 British diarist Samuel Pepys was so relieved after his successful bladder stone surgery in
1658 that he decided to celebrate the occasion every single year. While the surgeon did
remove a major bladder stone, Pepys suffered a few complications from the operation.

 Catch-22 author Joseph Heller worked on many major screenplays in Hollywood to earn a
living. A few major movies Heller worked on include Sex and the Single Girl and the first
film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.

 British war poet Wilfred Owen thought about enlisting in the French army at the start of
World War I. Owen was working as a teacher in France when WWI broke out. Sadly,
Owen died shortly before Armistice and was buried in the French town of Ors.
 Siegfried Sassoon, another famous British WWI poet, befriended Wilfred Owen as they
were both recovering in a Scottish hospital. Sassoon had a huge impact on Owen and
encouraged the young poet to write. For those who are interested, Pat Barker based her
novel Regeneration on the friendship between Owen and Sassoon.

 Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was inspired to write his iconic WWI poem
“In Flanders Field” after his friend was killed in Ypres, Belgium. A few days after his
friend was buried, McCrae noticed poppies starting to bloom underneath the hundreds of
unmarked graves. Inspired by this image, McCrae quickly composed his iconic poem the
next day while riding in an ambulance.

 Controversial American author Charles Bukowski was definitely a cat person. He actually
wrote an entire book called On Cats. In one section of this book, Bukowski says he only
has to look at a cat to regain his courage.

 English poet William Blake only spent three years of his life outside of London. During
this time in the town of Felpham Blake worked hard on his famous Jerusalem. Blake also
got into a serious fight with the soldier John Schofield after he allegedly cursed the king
and said soldiers were no better than slaves.

 At the age of eleven, Japanese author Shūsaku Endō‘s aunt persuaded him to become a
Catholic. After studying in Tokyo, Endō studied Catholic theology in Lyon, France. By
the time of his death, authors around the world hailed Endō as “Japan’s Graham Greene.”

 Sudanese author Tayeb Salih‘s classic novel Season of Migrations to the North was
banned in his home country after it was published in 1989. The government banned the
novel due to its frank depictions of sex rather than its political implications. Today,
however, Salih’s novel is hailed around the world as a masterpiece of post-colonial
literature.

 Eighteenth-century Venetian author Giacomo Casanova started writing his epic

autobiography History of My Life late in life out of sheer boredom. A Bohemian count in
Duchcov, Czech Republic, protected Casanova from 1785 until Casanova’s death in 1798.
In case you were wondering, Casanova claims to have slept with 122 women in his
dazzling autobiography.

 Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope had his servant wake him up every day at 5:30 AM
with a hot cup of coffee. Trollope then spent three hours writing before he went to his day
job at the post office. Most days, Trollope was able to write an incredible 250 words per
15 minutes.
 The International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 5696 in honor of Norwegian
dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Astronomers at San Diego’s Palomar Observatory discovered
5696 Ibsen in 1960.

 After the first volume of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård‘s My Struggle was
published, numerous offices in Oslo banned workers from talking about the book on
Fridays. Bosses in Oslo complained that their employees were spending far too much time
talking about Knausgård’s text and not enough time doing their jobs.

 American author W. E. B. DuBois moved to Ghana in 1960 when he was in his 90s.
DuBois started work on an Encyclopedia Africana, but he passed away in 1963. Visitors
to the capital city Accra can visit the W. E. B. DuBois Memorial Center and see the room
DuBois stayed in as well as his final resting place.

 Gilded Age author Edith Wharton lived in Paris during World War I and was passionate
about helping the French war effort. In addition to working with charities and visiting the
Western Front, Wharton wrote numerous articles urging the USA to defend France. At the
end of the Great War, the French government gave Wharton a Legion of Honor for her
support.

 English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with the first printed use of
the words “selfless,” “psychosomatic,” “bipolar,” and “bisexual.” Coleridge is also
responsible for the now famous phrase “suspension of disbelief.”

 F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s classic short story “Babylon Revisited” sold to the Saturday Evening
Post for $4,000 in 1931. Adjusting for inflation, that’s close to $50,000 today. Once he
received the money for this story, Fitzgerald told Ernest Hemingway in a letter that he felt
like an “old whore.”

 It took Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata 12 years to complete his masterpiece Snow
Country. He especially struggled with choosing from dozens of possible conclusions. All
that hard work definitely paid off for Kawabata; he went on to become Japan’s first Nobel
Prize winner in the field of literature in 1968.

 After Fathers and Sons author Ivan Turgenev died in 1818, Russian surgeons took out his
brain and put it on a weight scale. They found that his brain weighed 2,021 grams (4.4
pounds), which was one of the heaviest to date on Russian records.
 Although every student learns about iambic pentameter studying William Shakespeare’s
verse, Christopher Marlowe‘s Tamburlaine the Great is the first official play totally in
blank verse. Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare, but he died at a younger age
after he was stabbed at a dining-house.

 With Christopher Marlowe in mind, it’s interesting (and sad) to note that he might have
indirectly caused the death of another great English Renaissance playwright: Thomas Kyd.
Kyd, who’s most famous for his play The Spanish Tragedy, was beaten up by government
agents demanding to know whether his roommate Marlowe was an atheist or not. Thomas
Kyd died in 1594, just one year after authorities gave him a good thrashing.

 While he was working at the Royal Library in Stockholm, playwright August Strindberg
learned how to read Chinese and organized the library’s Chinese manuscripts. Today,
millions of Chinese are just starting to get interested in Strindberg’s outstanding oeuvre.

 When Journey to the End of the Night author Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a soldier in
World War I, he agreed to carry a message for the French army and was shot in the arm in
Ypres. For his service in WWI, Céline was awarded a médaille militaire; however, he was
denounced by French authorities during WWII for his collaboration with the Nazis.

 As Anton Chekhov‘s body was transported from Germany to Moscow, a crowd of

mourners mistook General Keller’s funeral procession for Chekhov’s. Chekhov is now
buried in Moscow’s famous Novodevichy Cemetery with fellow Russian icons such as
Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Gogol.

 Nineteenth-century Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz was so beloved in his own time that
his fellow countrymen came together to buy him a small castle in 1900. Sienkiewicz lived
in this castle for a few years before World War I. Today, the Poznań castle serves as the
Henryk Sienkiewicz Museum.

 Chilean poet Pablo Neruda always wrote in green ink. For Neruda, green was a color of
hope and abundance and (apparently) helped his creative process. Children’s authors Pam
Muñoz Ryan and Peter Sís paid tribute to the great poet by publishing their 2010 book on
Neruda’s childhood The Dreamer in green ink.

 At the height of her critical acclaim, British author Doris Lessing sent two new novels to
her publisher under the pen name Jane Somers. Her UK publisher rejected both of these
novels (The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could). Lessing used this
experience to illustrate just how difficult it is for a new writer to get published.
 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of the Gulag Archipelago, spent over 20 years in Vermont
after being expelled from the USSR in 1974. In all that time, Solzhenitsyn never learned to
speak fluent English. Strangely, Solzhenitsyn did know how to read English and had read
English literature ever since he was a teenager.

 During WWII, Russian author Ivan Bunin lived in southern France and hid dozens of Jews
from the Nazis. The Soviet Union welcomed Bunin back after the war, but Bunin chose to
spend his final years in France. Bunin was the first Russian to ever win the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1933.

 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist author of The Yellow Wallpaper, was related to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gilman’s father was Stowe’s nephew,
and the Charlotte Perkins Gilman spent a fair amount of her childhood at Stowe’s Hartford
residence.

 There’s no evidence that President Abraham Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So
this is the little lady who started this great big war.” In fact, it’s not even clear whether
President Lincoln actually met with Stowe during the Civil War. Historians say this
popular rumor can be traced back to Stowe’s 1896 obituary.

 Staying on the topic of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of world literature’s greatest admirers
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was none other than Leo Tolstoy. The author of Anna Karenina
called Uncle Tom’s Cabin one of the prime “examples of the highest art flowing from love
of God and man.” Strange as it may seem, Tolstoy had far kinder things to say about
Stowe’s novel than Shakespeare’s King Lear.

 A few years after Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in present-day Tepetlixpa, Mexico,
she taught herself Latin, wrote a dramatic poem, and passed tests administered by scholars
in Mexico City. In 1669, Juana decided to enter into a convent so she would have no
worldly distractions to her intellectual pursuits.

 French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville initially traveled to the USA in 1830 to study
America’s prison system. At the end of his travels, de Tocqueville’s fellow traveler
Gustave de Beaumont wrote the majority of the penal system study while de Tocqueville
worked exclusively on his influential Democracy in America.

 Irish author and politician Edmund Burke had great difficulty with public speaking.
Burke’s public speeches at the House of Commons were so boring that many MPs left the
building once Burke took stood up.
 British author Rudyard Kipling‘s book Kim literally saved a French soldier’s life. French
Legionnaire soldier Maurice Hamonneau was shot in Verdun in 1913. Luckily for
Hamonneau, the bullet struck his copy of Kim, which was in his left breast pocket, and
stopped the bullet twenty pages away from his heart.

 Stephen Crane wrote the greatest Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, even
though he was born five years after the war ended. When asked how he was able to write
battle scenes with such accuracy, Crane said that he learned all he needed to know about
war from football.

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the only American poet to be honored with a bust in
London’s Westminster Abbey. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, but his
ancestry can be traced back to Yorkshire, England. During his lifetime, Longfellow was
almost as popular a poet as Lord Tennyson in the UK.

 Shortly after 19th century critic William Hazlitt passed away, his London landlady hid his
corpse underneath a bed. So desperate was this Soho landlady for new tenants that she
actually gave tours of the apartment while Hazlitt’s body was underneath the bed.

 Although only one of her poems survives intact, artists have hailed the Ancient Greek
poetess Sappho as on par with Homer. Sappho wrote at least nine volumes of poetry, but
most of the poems that survive today are in fragments on papyrus scrolls.

 Two great works by the Roman poet Ovid have been lost to the sands of time: the drama
Medea and a poem in praise of King Augustus written in the now extinct Getic language.
Luckily for literature lovers and mythologists, Ovid’s masterful Metamorphoses has
survived to the present day.

 Notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley invented quite a few alcoholic mixtures
throughout his life. One of his most famous concoctions, “Kubla Khan No. 2,” consists of
gin, vermouth, and laudanum (a commonly available opioid painkiller back in the day)

 Spanish artist Pablo Picasso inspired the Polish-Italian poet Guillaume Apollinaire to
imitate Cubism in his poetry. Apollinaire literally followed Picasso’s advice in a few
poems which he arranged in striking visual patterns. Many critics believe Apollinaire’s
work was a major inspiration behind the Surrealist movement.

 Shortly after Laurence Sterne died in 1768, grave robbers stole his body and sold it to be
used in an anatomy demonstration. Once a Cambridge surgeon recognized Sterne’s face,
 however, he ordered the body be returned to its grave. The author of Tristram Shandy is
now safely buried in Coxwold.

 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, was a professional pilot. In 1944,
Saint-Exupéry went on a flight to Corsica, but he never made it there. Cops discovered a
pilot’s body in Marseilles shortly after he went missing, but experts can’t definitively say
it was Saint-Exupéry’s.

 Edgar Allan Poe thought of having an owl quote “nevermore” in his famous poem “The
Raven.” Some letters indicate Poe was even considering using a parrot. Thankfully for
American literature, Poe decided the raven was “infinitely more in keeping with the
intended tone” of his poem.

 Aphra Behn wasn’t only a revolutionary Restoration writer; she also served as a spy under
Charles II. In fact, “Aphra Behn” was her codename. Behn was actually born Eaffrey
Johnson in 1640.

 Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw invested a great deal of money and time into
creating a new alphabet for the English language. His “Shavian alphabet” was intended to
get rid of spelling issues in English by creating a new system of symbols that had a 1:1
relationship to their phonemes. Obviously Shaw’s alphabet hasn’t really caught on in the
Anglosphere.

 John Steinbeck‘s dog ate his first manuscript of Of Mice and Men. Thankfully, Steinbeck
was only halfway through the piece at the time his dog tore it to shreds. Steinbeck
reportedly told a friend that this might’ve been a sign that his famous novella was in need
of serious revisions.

 While Samuel Richardson‘s Pamela was a major success after it was released in 1740, not
everyone enjoyed it. One of the most famous Pamela haters was none other than Henry
Fielding, the author of Tom Jones. Fielding made his displeasure with Pamela widely
known by consistently calling the novel Shamela.

 William Makepeace Thackeray wasted his father’s inheritance of £20,000 on gambling

and risky investments in the 1830s. It wasn’t until he published the first edition of his
famous Vanity Fair in 1847 that he gained financial stability and prestige.

 William Golding‘s masterpiece Lord of the Flies really struck a chord with big name rock
bands. U2 took the name of their song “Shadows and Tall Trees” from chapter seven of
Golding’s novel, and Iron Maiden released a track called “Lord of the Flies.”
 A study out of the University of Liverpool found that reading William Shakespeare in the
original activates certain areas of the brain associated with memory and reappraisal.
Researchers found that simple English “translations” of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan verse
didn’t have as profound an effect on the brain.

 Meiji Era author Ichiyō Higuchi wrote her greatest stories in her early twenties just before
her death of tuberculosis. She was living in a poor area of Tokyo near the red light district
at the time. Today, Japan honors Higuchi on the ¥5,000 note.

 Famous French philosopher Henri Bergson married the famous French author Marcel
Proust‘s cousin Louise Neuburger. Interestingly, Bergson’s ideas about time had a
profound influence on Proust’s long novel Remembrance of Things Past.

 Although many readers don’t know him today, John Lydgate (1370-1451 AD) is credited
with publishing the first epic poem in the English canon. Written in Middle English, the
Troy Book is over 30,000 lines long and details the entire history of Troy.

 French author Émile Zola died in 1902 from carbon monoxide poisoning resulting from a
blocked chimney. There’s still a debate as to whether his death was an accident or if
people who didn’t like his support of Alfred Dreyfus murdered Zola.

 When the Italian writer Umberto Eco visited Paris for the first time, he would only walk
down streets that had survived from the Middle Ages. He was studying medieval history at
the University of Turin at the time and was obsessed with the era.

 Although Renaissance writer Petrarch knew the poet Giovanni Boccaccio since 1361, he
never read Boccaccio’s celebrated Decameron until shortly before his death in 1374.
Petrarch also admitted to Boccaccio that he had never read Dante’s Divine Comedy.

 Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut was a huge fan of Cheers. Vonnegut once told
reporters he would’ve rather written scripts for this TV show than all his bestselling
novels.

 Parisian dramatist Jean-Paul Sartre loved to play pranks in his schooldays. He actually
convinced the French media that Charles Lindbergh was going to stop at his school and
hired a lookalike to give interviews. Sartre’s schoolmaster, Gustave Lanson, was
eventually fired due to Sartre’s shenanigans.
 When English Romantic William Blake was only four years old he claimed to see God
through a window. Throughout the rest of his life, Blake said he often communed with
angels and he incorporated these visions into his art.

 When the poet John Keats was a child, he was apparently quite adept at sports.
Interestingly, many of Keats’s schoolmates believed he would have a great career in the
art of war rather than the art of poetry.

 After retiring from writing at the age of 19, Arthur Rimbaud traveled extensively
throughout Europe and Africa. Records suggest the French poet was the first European to
step foot in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia.

 Gigi author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette could only write after she had plucked all the fleas
off of her cat. She also said she couldn’t write with shoes and socks on.

 The 16th-century poet Girolamo Fracastoro is only well-known today for one word:
syphilis. That’s right, we get the word for this devastating STD from one of Fracastoro’s
poems.

 Every year on December 17th, a group of devotees perform a dervish celebration by Jalāl
ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī‘s tomb at Turkey’s Mevlana Museum. The Sufi mystic
(commonly known as Rumi) was born in 1207 and died in 1273.

 While everyone knows that Shakespeare is the bestselling poet of all time, many people
can’t guess the number two and three spots correctly. In case you’re wondering, the
second bestselling poet is the Taoist sage Lao Tzu and third place goes to Lebanese-
American poet Kahlil Gibran.

 Canadian-American author Saul Bellow didn’t know his own birthday. His parents had
just arrived in Québec when he was born in 1915, and they forgot to record whether their
son was born on June 10th or July 10th. Unfortunately for Bellow, the city hall that
contained his official birth certificate burned down.

 Poet Xu Zhimo has inspired millions of Chinese tourists to visit Cambridge University.
His incredibly popular poem “Taking Leave of Cambridge Again” remains a staple in the
Chinese reading curriculum. To commemorate the poet’s work, Cambridge University put
inscriptions of the poem on white stones by the River Cam.
The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck wrote the manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath in a 100-day frenzy of creativity
during the summer of 1938. Despite the furious speed at which it was written, Steinbeck’s text, is
extremely neat, with few corrections or rewrites. Steinbeck’s notes to himself are scattered
throughout. Towards the end, his writing becomes progressively smaller and lacks punctuation,
reflecting the urgency of his need to conclude the work.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice was published, in three volumes, on 28 January 1813 for 18 shillings. All
1,500 copies sold, and a second edition was called for later the same year. Austen had sold the
copyright to the publisher, Thomas Egerton, for a one-off payment of £110 and made no further
profit. Egerton made four times as much money from the novel as Austen.

1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published by Secker & Warburg, in the UK, 35 years before the
date mentioned in its title. The book’s original title was The Last Man in Europe, but both
Orwell and his editor, Frederic Warburg, agreed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was catchier.

Moby Dick

Moby-Dick is a remarkable feat of literary imagination, but it was also inspired by several real-
life cases of vengeful whales. One legendary whale, an albino sperm whale named Mocha Dick,
developed a reputation for attacking ships off the coast of Chile, and in 1839 became the subject
of an article by J.N. Reynolds entitled “Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf
from a Manuscript Journal”. Melville read the article, which appeared in the New York monthly
magazine The Knickerbocker. He also drew on a book called Narrative of the Most
Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821), by Owen Chase,
which described the sinking of a whaling ship by an irate sperm whale off the coast of South
America.

The Age of Innocence

The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel was established in 1917, and quickly became one of the most
prestigious literary awards. The prize, one of several honouring achievements in the arts, was
funded from the will of American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and was to be awarded
annually to an outstanding novel. Pulitzer’s will stipulated that the prize should be awarded to
the book that best presented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life”. As many of
Wharton’s characters question and break social taboos, this stipulation seemed to exclude her
from ever winning the prize. However, the committee that set it up changed the text of the
conditions from “wholesome atmosphere” to “whole atmosphere”. The Age of Innocence
impressed the judges, and the book won the prize in 1921. Edith Wharton was the first woman
novelist to win a Pulitzer.