Writing – Page 5 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Bambi

Fun facts about Bambi, the children’s book on which the classic Disney film was based

1. The classic Disney film Bambi was based on a largely forgotten book. Bambi: A Life in the Woods was written by Felix Salten (born Siegmund Salzmann), an Austrian author, and published in 1926. A perhaps surprisingly fact, given that Salten would go on to pen a children’s classic, is that he was also the probable author of an anonymously published erotic novel, Josephine Mutzenbacher – The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself, which appeared twenty years before his Bambi book.

Five Fascinating Facts about the Limerick

By Dr Oliver Tearle

1. Nobody knows for sure why limericks are named limericks.

There have been numerous theories put forward for why the five-line verse known as the ‘limerick’ is so named, but none of them is conclusive. The name ‘limerick’ was first applied to the five-line form in the late nineteenth century, and one theory holds that comic verses once contained the line ‘Will [or won’t] you come (up) to Limerick?’

Five Fascinating Facts about Margaret Atwood

Fun facts about Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale

1. Atwood has had a record number of nominations for the Booker Prize. The Canadian novelist has been nominated five times for the prestigious award, and on one of those occasions, Atwood won the coveted prize, for The Blind Assassin. Her 2009 book The Year Of The Flood, a dystopian novel, reportedly infuriated the chair of the Man Booker panel so much that he threw it across the room. John Sutherland reports this in his hugely entertaining Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives: the book was hurled with such anger that it dented the judge’s bedroom wall!

Five Fascinating Facts about William Burroughs

Interesting William Burroughs facts: concerning his life, his work, and his links with other writers

1. Before he became a famous novelist, William S. Burroughs worked in pest-control as an exterminator. Many writers started out in somewhat surprising jobs. Douglas Adams was a bodyguard to a Middle Eastern family of oil magnates; Tarzan creator (and William Burroughs’ namesake) Edgar Rice Burroughs was a pencil sharpener salesman. But William Burroughs, who was born in 1914, started out working as an exterminator in Chicago. (Fittingly, Burroughs would later title one of his short-story collections Exterminator!) Burroughs would quit this job and move to New York, where he would meet Allen Ginsberg an Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation would take over the world.

Mark Twain’s Rules for Good Writing

Mark Twain’s 18 rules for writing – part of his response to the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper

Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the writer who once observed, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.’ (We include that pithy gem in our selection of Mark Twain’s best one-liners, and we’ve offered our favourite Mark Twain facts here.) In his essay, ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses‘ (1895), Twain took the author of The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans to task for his flawed writing style. Scathingly, but hilariously, he writes: