Authors – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

October 5 in Literature: First James Bond Film Released

The most significant events in the history of books on the 5th of October

What significant events in history occurred on October 5? In the world of literature and books, the day was an historic one that saw the release of the first film in a major franchise and the birth of an important figure of the French Enlightenment…

1713: Denis Diderot, the co-founder of the Encyclopédie, is born. When Catherine the Great heard that Diderot had fallen on hard times, she agreed to purchase his library and pay him an annual salary.

1840: John Addington Symonds is born. A scholar and poet, Symonds (pronounced ‘simmunds’) was an early champion of male homosexual love at a time when ‘homosexuality’ as a term was only just coming into existence.

Five Fascinating Facts about George Eliot

Fun facts from the life of Victorian novelist George Eliot, author of Middlemarch

1. She received £20 for her first book – which was a translation of a work of biblical scholarship. Before she reinvented herself as ‘George Eliot’, Mary Anne Evans (it’s also been spelled Mary Ann and Marian) was a translator of German works of ‘Higher Criticism’. Although of course she never attended university – no woman could until later in the century – Evans was exceedingly well-educated and undertook the translation of David Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu, or ‘Life of Jesus’, when she was in her mid-twenties. The book was controversial because it claimed that although a historical Jesus had probably existed, he was not the son of God.

10 Great Facts about Writers and Dogs

Short facts about writers and their pet dogs – and the canine figures in the works of famous authors

Fearing attacks from rivals, poet Alexander Pope rarely left his house without a brace of pistols and his dog, a Great Dane named Bounce.

One of Virginia Woolf’s first published pieces of writing was an obituary for the family dog, Shag.

The first draft of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog, Max.

Emily Brontë’s dog, Keeper, followed her coffin to the grave when she died and, for weeks after, howled outside her bedroom door waiting for its owner to return.

Jules Verne: Author or Fortune Teller?

By Spencer Blohm

Jules Verne is one of the most influential and celebrated writers in the history of science fiction. But his novels contain more than just entertainment. His wild imagination and propensity for thorough research led not only to enthralling adventure stories, but some eerily accurate predictions in the realm of scientific advancement.

In the 1870 classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Verne describes the Nautilus, an underwater vessel capable of traversing the ocean’s depths. A ship of this concept had never been seen by the protagonists of the novel, or by its readers at the time. While primitive submarines existed at the time, electric powered subs like the Nautilus wouldn’t come about until the early 1900s.

Five Fascinating Facts about J. G. Ballard

Interesting facts about the life and books of J. G. Ballard

1. When they rejected J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, one publisher remarked that the author was ‘beyond psychiatric help’. Known for exploring unusual and controversial human impulses and their relationship to modernity and technology, Ballard said that everything he wrote was inspired by his early childhood and teenage experiences in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai in the early 1940s. His most popular novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), is about these early years which showed him the ‘pathology’ underlying modern life. In 1987 Steven Spielberg successfully filmed Empire of the Sun. David Cronenberg directed Crash in 1996; the novel, and film, focus on people who get a sexual thrill out of car accidents. A film adaptation of his 1975 novel High Rise, starring Tom Hiddleston, is set to be released soon. Ballard also provided the story for the 1970 film When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, although he was credited as ‘J. B. Ballard’. In a sense, Ballard was always close to the cinema: for much of his life he lived in Surrey near Shepperton Studios. (Fittingly, Shepperton was one of the places destroyed in H. G. Wells‘s The War of the Worlds, that classic written by Ballard’s great predecessor in British SF.)