Literature – Page 534 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Anthony Burgess

Quick facts from the life of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange

1. His most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, may have been partly inspired by a dark event in Burgess’ past, shortly after he and his first wife married. For this classic novel, Burgess invented an entire new language, Nadsat (the name is taken from the Russian for ‘teen’ – i.e. a form of slang used by teenagers). Burgess, a gifted linguist, would later translate T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Persian (unfortunately, the translation has not been published). The book was made into an even more controversial film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. Burgess had mixed feelings about the film, referring to it as ‘Clockwork Marmalade’, and he received just £5,000 in subsidiary rights for the film. Quite where the title A Clockwork Orange came from remains a mystery, but Gary Dexter has speculated that Burgess may have misheard ‘Terry’s Chocolate Orange’ in a noisy pub and liked the mondegreen so much he used it as the book’s title. The title has inspired the nickname ‘The Clockwork Orange’ for Glasgow’s metro system.

15 Interesting Facts about Reading for International Literacy Day

Interesting facts about literacy and reading in honour of International Literacy Day

In honour of International Literacy Day on 8 September, we’ve put together fifteen of our favourite facts about literacy and reading. Some are funny, some are surprising, and some are shocking; but all, we hope, are interesting in some way. This post might be considered a sequel to our previous post comprising 10 great quotations for International Literacy Day.

Reading for just six minutes a day can reduce stress by 68%.

‘Bibliotherapy’ is ‘the use of reading matter for therapeutic purposes’.

In 1879, Charles J. Dunphie published a book called Sweet Sleep: A Course of Reading Intended to Promote That Delightful Enjoyment.

Five Fascinating Facts about Jack Kerouac

Interesting facts from the life of Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road

1. Jack Kerouac typed up his novel On the Road on one continuous roll of paper that was 120 feet long. Kerouac called it ‘the scroll’ – a stream of tracing paper that Kerouac had created through taping individual sheets together. Although he wrote the original manuscript quickly, in just three weeks in 1951, Kerouac then spent time revising bits of the text before it was finally published six years later. Kerouac’s friends William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg both appear in the novel, as the characters Old Bull Lee and Carlo Marx respectively. The book became a key text for the Beat Generation: the ‘Beatnik Bible’. On the Road inspired John Updike to write his Rabbit tetralogy of novels: Updike objected to the ‘irresponsibility’ of Kerouac’s book and responded by writing Rabbit, Run (1960), the first of his four ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom novels, which appeared three years after the publication of On the Road. The book was intended, Updike said, ‘to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road: the people left behind get hurt.’

The Interesting Origins of the Phrase ‘Swings and Roundabouts’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Where does the phrase ‘swings and roundabouts’ originate? It’s widely believed that it had its origins in a little-known poem by Irish writer Patrick Reginald Chalmers (1872-1942). Chalmers was a banker as well as a poet, and he also wrote biographies of several literary figures, including author of Peter Pan J. M. Barrie and The Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame. (Curiously enough, we’ve delved into another phrase, the Wildean quip ‘I am not young enough to know everything‘, and traced it back to Barrie.)

10 Interesting Facts about Famous Writers at School

Fun facts about the schooldays of well-known authors and other literary types

September is the ‘back to school’ month, so to take the edge off that inevitable sinking feeling, we’ve put together ten great facts about the schooldays of famous writers. Some authors have been teachers, but all have been schoolchildren at some point. Here’s our pick of the best facts about writers at school. We’ve included a link on some authors’ names to previous interesting posts we’ve written about them.

Samuel Johnson had only three pupils enrol at the school he opened in his hometown of Lichfield in the 1730s. However, one of those three pupils was the actor David Garrick, who later followed Johnson to London to seek his fortune.

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined the word ‘pedant’ as a ‘schoolmaster’. (More facts about Johnson’s Dictionary here.)