UGC NET study material
INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT AUTHORS
❤️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 he
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