INTERESTING FACTS FROM LITERATURE

 
From the first epic to modern-day classics, the literary landscape is filled with authors and works that have inspired people throughout time. The following offerings are facts and trivia about writers and literature.
 

• The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh (the world’s first epic) was recorded in 1200 B.C.
• Sophocles, the Greek Playwright, of Oedipus Rex fame is believed to have been born in the year 496 B.C.
• The Roman poet Ovid wrote Ars Amatoria in c. 2 B.C.
• Chinese poet Li Po was born in the year 701.
• The first German ballad is called “Ludwigslied” and dates from 881.
• “Beowulf” was written in Old English around the year 1000.
• Dating from c. 1140, The Song of Roland or La Chanson de Roland, is the oldest literary work of the French.
• Dante, of Divine Comedy fame, was exiled from Florence in 1302.
• The year 1304 saw the birth of the Italian poet Petrarch.
• The tales of Robin Hood began to appear in English literature around the year 1375.
• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were printed in 1477.
• English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt also served as an ambassador for King Henry VIII.
• The first roofed Parisian theatre dates from 1548 and was named Hotel de Bourgogne.
• William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe were both born in the year 1564.
• English poet John Donne was the grandson of English playwright John Heywood.
• John Milton was born in Cheapside, London, England in 1608.
• French writer Moliere was the son of an interior decorator. Moliere was born in 1622.
• William Blake, born in 1757, was educated by his mother at home. His father was a hosier.
• Born in 1771, Sir Walter Scott suffered from polio as a young child that left him partially lame for the rest of his life.
• Charles Dickens began working at the age of twelve in a boot blacking factory.
• Born in 1804, George Sand was a distant relative of French king Louis XVI.
• 1805 witnessed the birth of Hans Christian Andersen in Odense, Denmark. One of his most famous tales is “The Little Mermaid.”
• In 1806, Napoleon’s Army invaded Weimar and actually occupied Goethe’s house where he was living with his mistress and their son.
• Considered the father of modern Russian literature, Aleksandr Pushkin was killed in a duel with his wife’s lover in 1837.
• Like his mother and brother, English poet John Keats died from tuberculosis.
• The son of a surgeon, Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854.
• American author Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876. He was the son of an astrology “professor.”
• Herman Melville dedicated his novel Moby Dick to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter.
• Evelyn Waugh, Nathanael West and George Orwell were each born in 1903.
• Born in Calcutta, India, Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
• George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
• Although he lived most of his life in England, the poet T.S. Eliot was actually born in St. Louis, Missouri.
• Robert Frost’s Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1931.
• In 1959, the U.S. postmaster banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the U.S. mail for reasons of obscenity.
• Many sources consider Agatha Christie (author of sixty-six mysteries) the bestselling author of all time.
• Acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood wrote Surfacing in 1972.
• Contemporary mystery writer Anne Perry is also a convicted murderer from a notorious crime committed in 1954 in a New Zealand park when she was a teenager.
• 1988 saw Toni Morrison win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Beloved.