But when Mirriam Websters First version of their dictionary was published they received one complaint that was not related to them missing words.
A 80 year old woman wrote in she was “shocked that such a useful book would contain curse words and their meanings” and admonished them for having them in to shock her sensibilities.
The response to her was “Ah but madam…this means you were LOOKING for the words in the first place.”
Dunno if it was true but it is good for a laugh.
Not only that Kerouac in the original draft of On the Road used no punctuation. The whole novel came out as one sentence.
H.P. Lovecraft so admired Clark Ashton Smith that a high priest in one of his stories was named, Klar Kash Ton.
Albert Camus (the existentialist who wasn’t Sartre) was a goalkeeper for the Algerian international soccer team. Apparently he used his time between the sticks well: “All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”.
Whatever that means.
not really literary, but something I must share.
Two men lied about their age to join thae Army for World war one.
The two men ended up driving an ambulance together. If a landmine had exploded under the ambulance, life as we know it would be profoundly changed. One of the Men was Ray Krock, who bought into a restauraunt with the McDonald Brothers (and later bought them out and ran them out of business), to create one of the largest franchieses in the world.
The other man was Walt Disney.
And as for a literary factoid, Neal Cassidy, the man who the main character in On the Road was modelled on, drove the bus for Ken Kasey’s Merry Pranksters.
Kroc never went to war…
IIRC Hemingway lost his first novel (well, I think his wife actually lost it, but…)
In the first chapter of Moby-Dick, Ishmail ruminates that if Fate had an outline for his adventures at sea, it would fall between a “Great Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “Bloody Battle in Afghanistan.” That Melville guy was pretty prescient, huh?
Watership Down is a real place, and is now owned by Andrew Lloyd Weber. And the bunnies keep going, and going, and going…
I can see Adlestrop from my front bedroom window.
I vaguely remember seeing a movie about Beehtoven’s(sp?) maid threw out some of his sheet music, thinking it was trash. But this is by no means a certainty. Just a vague recollection of a movie I saw long ago.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s relative (grandfather I believe), John Hawthorne, was a primary judge in the Salem Witch trials.
Neal Cassidy’s son also plays some pretty decent guitar. I’ve played sax and flute as a side man in one of his bands.
Pearl S. Buck is the only woman to win both the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize.
Um, I hate to be so Straight Dopish about this, but could we have a handful of cites around here? The “?”, “!” thing I’ve heard attributed to General Pershing asking about a battle, not Hugo[sup]*[/sup], and a few of these other factoids sound somewhat suspicious to me.
*I’m not saying that it was Pershing, just that there’s enough doubt to warrent a cite
For which Nathaniel’s family removed the “w” in Hathorne.
Still searching for a cite, but I do recall hearing that Robert Louis Stephenson wrote “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in about 3 days. His wife read it and was so horrified by the story that Stephenson destroyed the manuscript.
He re-wrote the novel in another 3 days and had it published.
One cite I found claims Stephenson was on a 6 day cocaine binge when he wrote the book. I hadn’t heard this before and the cite offers no evidence for that claim.
Oddly enough, those two characters comprise the entirety of the first two pages (first page says “?”, second says “!”) of Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Lies.
I wonder if there’s a connection.