Literature – Page 535 – Interesting Literature

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.)

Five Fascinating Facts about Mary Shelley

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. Her most famous novel, Frankenstein, is widely considered the first science fiction novel.

Brian Aldiss certainly thinks so. It’s worth mentioning here that two other leading science (fiction) writers, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, argued that the honour of ‘first science-fiction novel’ should go to a much earlier book: Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (‘The Dream’), first published in 1634.

Five Fascinating Facts about H. Rider Haggard

Fun facts about the life and work of Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines and She

1. He is the author of one of the biggest-selling books of all time.

H. Rider Haggard’s She (Oxford World’s Classics) (1887) is reckoned to be one of the bestselling novels ever published: by 1965 it had sold some 83 million copies. Ayesha, the ‘she’ of the title, is a powerful and mysterious white queen who rules the African Amahagger people. Ayesha has magic powers and is immortal, making She a fantasy adventure novel, precursor to the fiction of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and countless other writers of the twentieth century.