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    Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia
    Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia
    Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia
    Ebook84 pages42 minutes

    Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia

    By Richard Lederer

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    About this ebook

    The author of Anguished English presents a compendium of fascinating facts and anecdotes about some of literature’s greatest authors and works.

    Author and English teacher Richard Lederer is one of the world’s foremost lovers of language and literature. In this endlessly engaging volume, he collects some of the most curious trivia about world-renowned authors and poets as well as their many immortal creations. The perfect gift for bibliophiles, Richard Lederer’s Literary Trivia sheds surprising new light on the books and writers we love.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 6, 2014
    ISBN9781423637714
    Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia
    Author

    Richard Lederer

    Richard Lederer is the author of more than 30 books about language, history, and humor, including his best-selling Anguished English series and his current book, Presidential Trivia. He has been profiled in magazines as diverse as The New Yorker, People, and the National Enquirer and frequently appears on radio as a commentator on language. Dr. Lederer's syndicated column, "Looking at Language," appears in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. He has been named International Punster of the Year and Toastmasters International's Golden Gavel winner.

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      Book preview

      Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia - Richard Lederer

      Introduction

      Literature lives. Literature endures. Literature prevails. That’s because readers bestow a special kind of life upon people who have existed only in books. Figments though they may be, literary characters can assume a vitality and longevity that pulse more powerfully than flesh and blood.

      After many years, the publishers of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web persuaded E. B. White to record his book on tape. So caught had the author become in the web of his arachnid heroine’s life that it took nineteen tapings before White could read aloud the passage about Charlotte’s death without his voice cracking.

      A century earlier, another writer had been deeply affected by the fate of his heroine. Like most of Charles Dickens’s works, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was published in serial form. The novel won a vast readership on both sides of the Atlantic, and as interest in the fate of the heroine, Little Nell, grew intense, circulation reached the staggering figure of 100,000, a record unequaled by any other of Dickens’s major novels. In New York, 6,000 people crowded the wharf where the ship carrying the final Master Humphrey’s Clock magazine installment was due to dock. As it approached, the crowd’s impatience grew to such a pitch that they cried out as one to the sailors, Does Little Nell die?

      Alas, Little Nell did die, and tens of thousands of readers’ hearts broke. The often ferocious literary critic Lord Jeffrey was found weeping with his head on his library table. You’ll be sorry to hear, he sobbed to a friend, that little Nelly, Boz’s little Nelly, is dead. Daniel O’Connell, an Irish M.P., burst out crying, He should not have killed her, and then, in anguish, threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was traveling. A diary of the time records another reader lamenting, The villain! The rascal! The bloodthirsty scoundrel! He killed my little Nell! He killed my sweet little child!

      That bloodthirsty scoundrel was himself shattered by the loss of his heroine. In a letter to a friend Dickens wrote, I am the wretchedest of the wretched. It [Nell’s death] casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all. Nobody will miss her like I shall.

      Even more famous than Charlotte and Little Nell is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective. The intrepid sleuth’s deerstalker hat, Inverness cape, calabash pipe, and magnifying glass are recognized by readers everywhere, and the stories have been translated into more than sixty languages, from Arabic to Yiddish.

      In December of 1887, Sherlock Holmes came into the world as an unheralded and unnoticed Yuletide child in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. When, not long after, The Strand Magazine began the monthly serialization of the first dozen short stories entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the issues sold tens of thousands and the public furiously clamored for more.

      At the height of success, however, the creator wearied of his creation. He yearned for higher writing and felt his special calling to be the historical novel. In December 1893, Doyle introduced the arch criminal Professor James Moriarty into the last story in the Memoirs series. In The Final Problem, Holmes and the evil professor wrestle at a cliff’s edge in Switzerland. Grasping each other frantically, sleuth and villain plummet to their watery deaths at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.

      With Holmes forever destroyed, Doyle felt he could abandon his mystery stories and turn his authorial eyes to the romantic landscapes of the Middle Ages. He longed to chronicle the clangor of medieval battles, the derring-do

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