Fun facts about the author of I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
1. He was a huge influence on Stephen King. The king (pun intended) of contemporary American horror fiction has called Matheson ‘the author who influenced me the most as a writer’; Matheson’s vampire novel I Am Legend was, King has said, ‘an inspiration to me’. (We compiled some fascinating facts about King here.) Ray Bradbury, too, paid homage to Matheson, calling him ‘one of the most important writers of the 20th century’.
Some quick facts about celebrated poet Rupert Brooke and his short but interesting life
2015 marks the centenary of Rupert Brooke’s death, so we thought we’d offer some interesting facts about the life of one of Britain’s most popular war poets.
1. Rupert Brooke once went skinny-dipping with Virginia Woolf. This happened in Cambridge, where Brooke (1887-1915) was a student. He had won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge after writing a dissertation on Jacobean playwright John Webster and his debt to Elizabethan drama.
2. He was a huge influence on another celebrated war poet. Brooke was something of a hero to John Gillespie Magee, who would write one of the most famous poems of the Second World War, ‘High Flight‘. As well as that sonnet, Magee also wrote a ‘Sonnet to Rupert Brooke’. Magee also won the same poetry prize at Rugby School which Brooke had won some thirty years earlier.
Fun facts about the life of William Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner (1897-1962) is one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. He is known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County in his home state of Mississippi. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.
Five fun facts from the biography of J. D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye
1. At high school, J. D. Salinger was so fond of acting that he signed the yearbook with the names of the roles he’d performed. His father, however, didn’t want Salinger Jr. to go into acting, and he went to New York University for a year before dropping out. Somewhat aimless, he worked for a short time in Europe as an importer/exporter in the ham trade – an experience which converted him to vegetarianism. He had taken the job at the behest of his father.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. George Orwell coined the phrase ‘Cold War’ – well, sort of.