I’ve seen threads for movie and TV trivia, but none for literature (unless some nice Doper can show me otherwise ). So bring on all the trivia you know about literature. It can be about books or authors. I’ll start:
*George Orwell based the infamous Room 101 in 1984 from a room at the BBC, where Orwell worked during WWII. In this Rm. 101 they would hold meetings, which Orwell found horrendously boring. Also in real life, Orwell was afraid of rats, just like Winston Smith.
*Orson Scott Card came up with the name “Ender” because he wanted to incorporate the phrase “end game” (as in chess) somewhere, hence Ender’s Game.
The original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is listed on the cover of most editions as Ten Little Indians. The title change was due to the potential for this title to be offensive to Indians, and because it makes no sense for a book set on an island off the coast of South Africa. However, Ten Little Indians was the second title. The original title was Ten Little Niggers.
E. E. “Doc” Smith – the writer of space operas – was indeed a Ph.D. His area of expertise, however, was food science and one of his discoveries was supposedly a method to make sugar stick to donuts.
Lionel Fanthorpe wrote the novel “Radar Alert” in 11 hours.
James Hall and Charles Nordhoff were already celebrities by the time they wrote the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy.
They were among the first members of the Escadrille Americaine, later the Escadrille Lafayette, a group of American pilots who fought for France both before and after the Americans joined World War I. The squadron received international press and adulation entirely out of proportion to their already brave exploits.
Jack Kerouac used to sit down in front of the typewriter with a whole lot of alcohol and a whole lot of bennies. He would keep drinking and popping bennies for days at a time, not moving until he crashed. Then when he’d wake up he’d start it over again until the novel was finished. He so liked being in “the zone” that instead of sheets of paper he’d type on rolls, so that he wouldn’t have to break his pure flow every thirty or forty lines. Kerouac would have loved the word processor.
The manuscript for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was almost lost. While boarding a ship, the dock hands loading Hugo’s dunnage almost dropped the trunk containing the entire manuscript overboard. There’s one hell of a rewrite!
Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 was originally titled Catch-18, but Leon Uris had just released Mila 18, also about WWII, so Heller’s publisher asked him to change it. Heller pondered a bit and thought he liked the alliterative nature of 22, hence the title which now is also a standard catchphrase.
“And Then There Were None” was set on Indian Island, off the coast of Devon, in the U.K., not in Africa. It was originally titled “Ten Little Niggers”, though. Did the location change?
Victor Hugo has a Guinness record for the shortest correspondence character-wise with another person. He wanted to know how his new book Les Misérables was selling, so he wrote his publisher. Here is the complete text of that letter:
That’s nothing. When Thomas Carlyle completed his original manuscript to “The French Revolution”, he gave it to a friend to read. The friend’s maid, thinking it scrap paper, used it to start a fire (shades of Blackadder!). Carlyle had already destroyed his notes.
In Walt Whitman’s poems, there were references which puzzled critics for some time. One of these was “adhesiveness” in “Songs of the Open Road”. This term and others were finally recognized as references to phrenology!
Robert Browning’s poem, “Pippa Passes”, contains the famous line “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world!”
It also contains this less famous passage:
The underlined word has always meant what it means now, but for some reason Browning didn’t know that and thought it referred to something nuns wore on their heads (no maidenhead puns, please).
Rudyard Kipling gave his maid (or maybe the nurse to one of his children…) a manuscript and told her to sell it if she was ever in need of money. One time she was and she sold it. The manuscript? The Jungle Book.
The scene in “Wind in the Willows” where Mole and Water Rat stumble across Bager’s home in the woods maybe the first published literary parody of Sherlock Holmes.
“The Scarlet Pimpernel” was the first masked hero with a secret identity.
H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch both wrote stories where they kill off thinly disguised parodies of each other.
Venus on the Half Shell, one of the Kilgore Trout books mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut’s works was actually published, with Trout’s name on the cover as the author.
While many people thought it was written by Vonnegut, it was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer, and later reprinted under Farmer’s name with an explanation as to why and how he published the Kilgore Trout novel.
). So bring on all the trivia you know about literature. It can be about books or authors. I’ll start: