• I want to do something splendid…something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.
  - Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Because they are mean is no reason why I should be. I hate such things, and though I think I’ve a right to be hurt, I don’t intend to show it.
  - Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.
  - Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
  - Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.
  - Fyodor Dosoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.
  - Fyodor Dosoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• No man lives, can live, without having some object in view, and making efforts to attain that object. But when object there is none, and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns a man into a monster.
  - Fyodor Dosoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from Undergroud”

• I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a particular sort of enjoyment - the enjoyment, of course, of despair.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground”

• But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ... What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground”

•             “If you can show a person logical proof that essentially he’s got nothing to cry about, he’ll stop crying. That seems clear. Don’t you think he’d stop crying?”
              “That would make life too easy,” Raskolnikov replied.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• - in the end she felt pity for me, for the lost man. And when a girl’s heart is moved to pity, that is, of course, most dangerous for her. She’s sure to want to “save” him then, to bring him to reason, to resurrect him, to call him to nobler aims, to regenerate him into a new life and new activity. Well, everyone knows what can be dreamt up in that vein. I saw at once that the bird was flying into my net on its own.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• He was a skeptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• So a man will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand, yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he feels no fear.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• ‘When reason fails, the devil helps!’ he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• People won’t change, nobody can reform them, and it’s not worth the effort! Yes, that’s right! It’s the law of their being… . Their law, Sonia! That’s right! I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong and self-confident in mind and spirit has power over them! Whoever is bold and dares has right on his side. Whoever can spit on the most people becomes their legislator, and whoever dares the most has the most right! So it has been in the past, and so it will always be!
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• There are some people who interest us immediately, at first glance, before a word is exchanged.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• He wants money for nothing, without waiting or working! We’ve grown used to having everything ready made, to walking on crutches, to having our food chewed for us. Then the great hour struck, and every man showed himself in his true colors.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• But how did I murder her? Is that how men do murders? Do men go to commit a murder as I went then? I will tell you some day how I went! Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, forever.… But it was the devil that killed that old woman, not I.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Why does my action strike them as so horrible? Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the law…and that’s enough.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• I like it when people lie! Lying is man’s only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie—you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that’s honorable in its way; well, but we can’t even lie with our own minds!
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• The harmonious man, it needs to be said, hardly exists at all; out of many tens, even hundreds of thousands perhaps one or two at most are encountered, and even then in rather feeble versions.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it … one must have the courage to dare.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• When reason fails, the devil helps!
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that’s just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That’s what they regard as the highest point of progress.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions…
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• ‘We’ve got facts,’ they say. But facts aren’t everything; at least half the battle consists in how one makes use of them!
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing - that was what his days on earth held in store for him… What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist?
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him - he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him…
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• ‘You’re a gentleman,’ they used to say to him. ‘You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.’
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won’t be wiser?
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• The convict is obedient and submissive up to a certain point; but there is a limit which must not be overstepped. By the way, nothing can be more curious than these strange outbreaks of impatience and revolt. Often a man is patient for several years, is resigned, endures most cruel punishment, and suddenly breaks out over some little thing, some trifle, a mere nothing. From a certain point of view he might be called mad.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• The idea has occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• I fancy that one can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• Or take the case of an educated man with an awkward conscience, intelligence, heart. The mere ache of his own heart will kill him by its torments sooner than any punishment. He condemns himself for his crime more unsparingly, more relentlessly than the most rigorous law.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• Evidently he must have considered himself an exceedingly clever person, as is usually the case with limited and dull-witted people.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• Not without an element of that malignant pleasure which at times is almost a craving to tear open one’s wound on purpose, as though one desired to revel in one’s pain, as though the consciousness of one’s misery was an actual enjoyment.
  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

• It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
  - Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

• Some people might have made a book out of it; but the story I am going to tell you is one that took all my strength to live and over which I spent all my virtue. So I shall set down my recollections quite simply, and if in places they are ragged I shall have recourse to invention and neither patch nor connect them; any effort I might make to dress them up would take away from the last pleasure I hope to get in telling them.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• It was not so much happiness that I sought in the future as the infinite effort to attain it, and in my mind I already confounded happiness with virtue.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• I should like to understand what you mean by ‘remarkable.’ One can be very remarkable without its showing - at any rate in the eyes of men - very remarkable in the eyes of God.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• Don’t ask too much of me. I shouldn’t care for Heaven if you were not there too.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• But the course my mind pursued was always shaped with reference to her, and what preoccupied us at that time, what we called ‘thought,’ was often merely pretext for more subtle communion, merely the disguise of feeling, merely the covering of love.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• Oh, lovely shifts of love, of love’s very excess, by what hidden ways you led us, from laughter to tears, from the most artless joy to the exactions of virtue!
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• Two weeks and months went by in monotonous occupations; but as there was nothing on which I could fasten my thoughts but memories or hopes, I hardly noticed how slow the time was, how long the hours.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• Ah! This which we call happiness, how intimate a part of the soul it is, and of what little importance are the outside elements that seem to go to its making!
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• I often think that my love is the best part of me; that all my virtues are suspended to it; that it raises me above myself, and that without it I should fall back to the mediocre level of a very ordinary disposition.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• How happy must that soul be for whom virtue is one with love! Sometimes I doubt whether there is any other virtue than love … to love as much as possible and continually more and more.
  - Andre Gide, Strait is the Gate

• I present this book for what it is worth - a fruit filled with bitter ashes, like those colocinths of the desert that grow in a parched and burning soil. All they can offer to your thirst is a still more cruel fierceness - yet lying on the golden sand they are not without a beauty of their own.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• The public nowadays will not forgive an author who, after relating an action, does not declare himself either for or against it; more than this, during the very course of the drama they want him to take sides, pronounce in favor either of Alceste or Philinte, of Hamlet or Ophelia, of Faust or Margaret, of Adam or Jehovah. I do not indeed claim that neutrality (I was going to say ‘indecision’) is the certain mark of a great mind; but I believe that many great minds have been very loath to … conclude - and that to state a problem clearly is not to suppose it solved in advance.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• I am neither sad nor cheerful; the air here fills one with a kind of vague excitement and induces a state as far removed from cheerfulness as it is from sorrow; perhaps it is happiness.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• I have reached a point in my life beyond which I cannot go. Not from weariness, though. But I can no longer understand things.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• And so I reached the age of twenty-five, having barely cast a glance at anything but books and ruins and knowing nothing of life; I spent all my fervor in my work. I loved a few friends… but it was not so much my friends I loved as friendship - it was a craving for high-mindedness that made my devotion to them so great; I cherished in myself each and all of my fine feelings. For the rest, I knew my friends as little as I knew myself.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• I realized that he gave me up for lost. Shall I confess that I felt not the least shock? I was very tired, I simply let myself go. After all, what had life to offer? I had worked faithfully to the end, resolutely and passionately done my duty. The rest … oh! what did it matter? thought I, with a certain admiration of my own stoicism.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• Hitherto, I had let myself live passively, trusting to the vaguest of hopes; suddenly I perceived my life was attacked - attacked in its very center. An active host of enemies was living within me. I listened to them; I spied on them; I felt them. I should not vanquish them without a struggle … and I added half aloud, as if better to convince myself: ‘It is a matter of will.’
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

•    ‘You mustn’t pray for me, Marceline.’
    ‘Why not?’ she asked, a little troubled.
    ‘I don’t want any favors.’
    ‘Do you reject the help of God?’
    ‘He would have a right to my gratitude afterwards. It entails obligations. I don’t like them.’
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• How long did we stay there? I cannot tell. What mattered time?… I thought of nothing; what mattered thoughts?
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• The history of the past had now taken on for me the immobility, the terrifying fixity of the nocturnal shows in… the immobility of death.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• There is nothing more tragic for a man who has been expecting to die than a long convalescence. After that touch from the wing of Death, what seemed important is no longer; other things become so which had at first seemed unimportant, or which one did not even know existed.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• But oh! when I saw myself, the emotion that filled me, and which I tried to keep down, was not pleasure, but fear. I do not criticize this feeling - I record it.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• I soon came to understand that the things that are reputed worst (lying, to mention only one) are only difficult to do as long as one has never done them; but that they become - and very quickly too - easy, pleasant and agreeable to do over again, and soon even natural.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• But I believe that there comes a point in love, once and no more, which later on the soul seeks - yes, seeks in vain - to surpass; I believe that happiness wears out in the effort made to recapture it; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• Men’s finest works bear the persistent marks of pain.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• The whole past suddenly rose up, as though it had been lying in wait for my approach to close over and submerge me.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• As a breath of wind sometimes ripples the surface of a tranquil pool, the slightest emotion was visible in her face; she was listening now to the new life mysteriously quivering within her, and I leaned over her as over deep transparent waters where, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was to be seen but love. Ah! if this was still happiness, I know I did my best to hold it, as one tries - in vain - to hold the water that slips between one’s joined hands; but already I felt, close beside my happiness, something not happiness, something indeed that colored my love, but with the colors of autumn.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• I have never been a brilliant talker; the frivolity, the wit, the spirit of fashionable drawing-rooms, were things in which I could take no pleasure;… In other people’s company, I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• I found very little more pleasure in talking to them than in consulting a good dictionary. I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• What did I mean by ‘living’? That is exactly what I wanted to find out. One and another talked cleverly of the different events of life - never of what is at the back of them.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• …the secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who has known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• One must allow other people to be right, it consoles them for not being anything else.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know but one. It is madness to envy other people’s happiness; one would not know what to do with it. Happiness won’t come to one ready-made; it has to be made to measure.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• One imagines one possess and in reality one is possessed.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• Oh, I thought, without a doubt, everything in my life is falling to pieces. Nothing that my hand grasps can my hand hold.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• You are never satisfied until you have made people exhibit some vice. Don’t you understand by looking at any particular trait, we develop and exaggerate it? And that we make a man become what we think him?
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• If only our paltry minds were able to embalm our memories! But memories keep badly. The most delicate fade and shrivel; the most voluptuous decay; the most delicious are the most dangerous in the end. The things one repents of were at first delicious.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• What frightens me, I admit, is that I am still very young. It seems to me sometimes that my real life has not begun. Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself.
  - André Gide, The Immoralist

• Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov 1812-1891 was one of the leading members of the great circle of Russian writers who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, gathered around the Sovremennik Contemporary under Nekrasov’s editorship - a circle including Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Belinsky, and Herzen… [Goncharov’s] strength was in the steady delineation of character, conscious of, but not deeply disturbed by, the problems which were obsessing and distracting smaller and greater minds. Tolstoy has a characteristically prejudiced reminiscence: ‘I remember how Goncharov, the author, a very sensible and educated man but a thorough townsman and an aesthete, said to me that, after Turgenev, there was nothing left to write about life in the lower classes. It was all used up. The life of our wealthy people, with their amorousness and dissatisfaction with their lives, seemed to him full of inexhaustible subject-matter….’
  - Introduction to The Precipice Preface by Ivan Goncharov

• He consumed passionately history, novels, and tales; wherever he could he begged for books. But he did not like facts or theories or anything that drew him from the world of fancy towards the world of reality.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• In Malinovka and the neighborhood there were tragic memories connected with this precipice… None of the servants went down to the precipice, and the peasants from the outskirts of the town and from Malinovka made a detour to avoid it… Yet he was attracted by the mysterious darkness of the tangled wood to the precipice, to the lovely view…
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• He expected something, he knew not what, from the future. He was filled with passion, with the foretaste of pleasure; there rose before him a world of wonderful music, marvelous pictures, and the murmur of enchanting life.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• Life knocked at the door and tore him from his artist’s dreams to a dissolute existence of alternating pleasure and boredom.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

•      “You are a lost man. Where have you lived, and what have you don. Tell me, for Heaven’s sake, what your purpose in life is, and what you really are?”
      “What I am…? The unhappiest of men!” He leaned his head back on the cushion as he spoke.
      “Never say such a thing,” she interrupted. “Fate hears and exacts the penalty, and you will one day be unhappy. Either be content or feign content.”
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• It was plain that as his mind nourished itself on the books, so his heart had found a warm refuge; he himself did not even know what bound him to life and books, and did not guess that he might keep his books and lose his life…
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• You repress your love, you are afraid, and instead of giving yourself up to the pleasure of it you are forever analyzing.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• Imagine that you sat upon hot coals, and were dying every minute of terror, and of wild impatience, that happiness rose before you, stretching out enticing arms, only to vanish, that your whole being rose to meet it; imagine that you saw before you a last hope, a last glimmer. That is how it is with me at this moment. The moment will be lost, and with it everything else.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• Passion and jealousy set loose raged unchecked, and when pity raised her head she was quenched by the torturing, overmastering feeling of outrage. He suppressed the low voice of sympathy, and his better self was silent. He was shuddering, conscious that poison flowed in his veins the poison of lies and deception.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• He recognized bitterly that he was beaten, that his romance ended here at the foot of the precipice, which he must leave without once turning round, with no pity, no word of farewell to speed him; he was bidden to go as if he were a contemptible enemy… It was as if he had been struck with a knife, and a cold shiver ran through his body.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• Take me with you, and have pity on a blind, insane individual, who has only today had his eyes opened to his real calling. I have groped about in the darkness for a long time, and have nearly committed suicide, that is, let my talent perish.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• I may fall in love, but I shall never love anyone as I do you. I will carve your statue in marble, for you always stand vividly before my eyes.
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• I must escape from these dangerous places, from your precipices and abysses. Farewell, farewell!
  - Ivan Goncharov, The Precipice

• Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”

• There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “Celephaïs”

• No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “Ex Oblivione”

• Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos…
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “From Beyond”

• Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West : Re-Animator”

• Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “The Tomb”

• My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing…
  - H.P. Lovecraft, “The Transition of Juan Romero”

• The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

• It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

• They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Someday he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

• I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

• From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Shunned House

• To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!
  - H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness

• Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.
  - Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

• I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.
  - Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

• Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
  - Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

• I was a child and she was a child,
  In this kingdom by the sea,
  But we loved with a love that was more than love —
  I and my Annabel Lee —
  With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
  Coveted her and me.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”

• For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

• Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

• Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates — the darkest and most evil of thoughts.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

• It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night — and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

• Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen —; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

• The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

• To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

• Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
  Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
  As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

• Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

• Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
  Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
  Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
  Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!“
  Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.”
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

• True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

• Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

• And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
  - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

• Existing on the periphery of literary traditions on an almost universal scale is an element belonging to the grotesque and perverse. This manifests itself in numerous ways, from the sensational to the sublime; yet, despite whatever literary quality such writings might demonstrate, they are generally barred from serious academic consideration by virtue of their very nature. Only the most exceptional of these writers have managed to break the constraints of convention and achieve a degree of respect within scholarly circles, but even these are generally considered as anomalies, rather than as members of the literary mainstream. Within the Japanese literary tradition, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) is perhaps the most noteworthy example of this type of macabre artist. His tales, writes Donald Keene, ‘have acquired the status of classics, and are read in the schools and frequently reprinted;’ however, although esteemed as one of the principal figures of modern Japanese literature, the strangeness of his works, as well as his enigmatic life and suicide, have cast Akutagawa in a weird, abstruse light.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• Among the Occidental writers whose works Akutagawa is known to have admired and emulated, those of the American short story stylist, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), are of particular interest. At first glance, the tales of Akutagawa are thematically reminiscent of Poe’s, both sharing a fascination with the morbid and grotesque, as well as exhibiting a certain dark, almost cynical humor. Yet, such similarities between the works of Akutagawa and Poe are comparatively superficial when contrast to the more fundamental technical and ideological parallels demonstrated between these two bodies of fiction. The importance of Poe’s influence on the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke should not be underestimated, as it constitutes not only an additional literary source for his tales, but also one of the essential elements of Akutagawa’s development as a writer of short stories.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• The works of Edgar Allan Poe were among the first examples of American literature to be introduced into Japan. By as early as 1888, only twenty years after the ‘reopening’ of Japan to the West, two of Poe’s tales, ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ had been translated into Japanese; and this at the time when the American short story was eclipsed in Japan by the ‘more enlightened writings’ of such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin. Supported in the English literature classrooms of Tokyo Imperial University by admirers of the caliber of Lafcadio Hearn, who described [Poe] to student’s as ‘a most consummate artist,’ and Hearn’s successor, Natsume Sōseki, Poe’s fame and popularity spread among both Japanese student’s and writers.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• In 1891, [Lafcadio] Hearn gave a lecture entitled ‘Poe’s Verse’ in which he praised the ingenuity of rhythm, vocabulary, and theme utilized by Poe, asserting: ‘We can find traces of Poe in almost every one of the greater poets of our time. One of the reasons for this influence was certainly that wonderful sense of the values of words, of their particular physiognomy, so to speak, which Poe shared with the greatest masters of language that ever lived. His instinct in this direction led him especially toward the strange, the unfamiliar, the startling; and he was able to produce effects of a totally unexpected kind.’ The most significant recognition of Poe during this period was, however, made by the celebrated author Natsume Sōseki, Hearn’s successor at Tokyo University… Calling Poe the ‘founder of the short story,’ Sōseki expressed his regard for the careful construction of Poe’s tales, appreciating the juxtaposition of structure and creativity. In doing this, Sōseki helped to propagate such methods of structure in the Japanese short story. Noriko Lippit notes that, ‘Sōseki’s essays on Poe, although they are brief, may well have been as influential as Hearn’s lectures in their positive appraisal of Poe’s short stories of fantasy and the grotesque, for they were written in Japanese for a wider audience of readers of literature, while Hearn’s lectures were delivered in English to a small, elite group of students of English literature. The serious discussion of Poe by a native Japanese author as respected as Sōseki cannot but have contributed to the overall favorable reception of his short stories and poetry, as well as his critical works.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• As a youth, Akutagawa read Japanese and Western authors known for their often darkly imaginative works, such as Mori Ōgai, Izumi Kyōka, Anatole France (whose Japanese introduction Akutagawa is credited with), Baudelaire, and Poe. Knowledge of such works he affixed to his already comprehensive understanding of Japanese and Chinese classic literature to form the basis of his literary vocabulary. In particular, the young Akutagawa, as evidenced in a passage from a 1928 ‘special edition’ of his semi-autobiographical work, ‘Daidouji Shinsuke no hansei,’ exhibited an early interest in the short stories of Poe: ‘[Akutagawa] would translate one page a day of Poe’s short stories. His primary intention of doing this was, more than perfectly translating Poe, to first study the composition of a story, and, secondly, to study the construction of his sentences in this hidden manner.’
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• Akutagawa’s habit of literary borrowing was, at its worst, little more than plagiarism; however, such instances were not only relatively scarce, but gradually diminished as his career progressed. Of more interest is the manner in which Akutagawa adopted not only the stories, but also themes and literary techniques, of other writers to augment and illustrate his own ideas. As [Donald] Keene writes, ‘Even when a scholar has identified to his own satisfaction the origins of some section of an Akutagawa story, there is generally no question of direct imitation.’ In the case of Akutagawa’s emulation of Poe, this holds particularly true; despite technical, stylistic, and thematic parallels between the works of both authors, the undeniably unique ideas of Akutagawa are apparent throughout his tales.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• Akutagawa, referring to ideas proposed in ‘Letters to Mr. ___,’ [by Edgar Allan Poe] clarifies the nature of Poe’s sense of poetic beauty as being ‘that which brings tears, which is, moreover, melancholic.’ He defines this melancholy as a mixture of ‘beauty and strangeness.’ This is determined as characteristic of not only Poe himself, but of his works as well. Contrasting Poe’s theories concerning poetry and the short story, Akutagawa observes that, for Poe, ‘Truth interferes with the rhyme of a poem; terror, passion, sarcasm, and humor are all the intention of the short story,’ and that ‘beauty cannot be the only aim’ of the short story, ideals reflected in both Poe’s and Akutagawa’s works of prose fiction.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar - if he is financially fortunate.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• …men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• ‘Look, son,’ [he] said earnestly, ‘nearly all men are afraid, and they don’t even know what causes their fear—shadows, perplexities, dangers without names or numbers, fear of a faceless death. But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, described and recognizable, by bullet or saber, arrow or lance, then you need never be afraid again, at least not the same way you were before. Then you will be a man set apart from other men, safe where other men may cry in terror.’
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar…
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against; any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• …we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• You know when a man lives alone as much as I do, his mind can go off on an irrational tangent just because his social world is out of kilter.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

•       “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”
        “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”
        “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• If it troubles us it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves… No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us… And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule—a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• [He] got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic?…. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• All great and precious things are lonely.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• I learned very early not to wish for things. Wishing just brought earned disappointment.
  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes it’ll on'y be one.
  - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

• The quality of owning freezes you forever in ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’
  - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

• How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
  - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

• And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
  - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

• …and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
  - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

• The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed.
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• I am not what you call a civilized man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• Perfume is the soul of the flower, and sea-flowers have no soul.
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• The earth does not want new continents, but new men.
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• Nature’s creative power is far beyond man’s instinct of destruction.
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the `Living Infinite,’ as one of your poets has said.
  - Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• Louisa May Alcott Biography:
            Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is one of America's best-known writers of juvenile fiction. She was also a reformer, working in the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage.
            Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pa., in 1832. She was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, the Concord transcendentalist philosopher and educator. She and her three sisters spent their childhood in poverty. However, they had as friends, and even as tutors, some of the most brilliant and famous men and women of the day, such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker. This combination of intellectual plenty and physical want endowed Alcott with an ironical sense of humor. She soon realized that, if she or her sisters did not find ways to bring money into the home, the family would be doomed to permanent poverty.
            In her early years Alcott worked at a variety of menial tasks to help financially. At 16 she wrote a book, Flower Fables (not published for 6 years), and she wrote a number of plays that were never produced. By 1860 she was publishing stories and poems in the Atlantic Monthly. During the Civil War she served as a nurse until her health failed, and her Hospital Sketches (1863) brought the first taste of widespread public attention.
            The attention seemed to die out, however, when she published her first novel, Moods, in 1865, and she was glad to accept in 1867 the editorship of the juvenile magazine Merry's Museum. The next year she produced the first volume of Little Women, a cheerful and attractive account of her childhood, portraying herself as Jo and her sisters as Amy, Beth, and Meg. The book was an instant success, so in 1869 she produced the second volume. The resulting sales accomplished the goal she had worked toward for 25 years: the Alcott family was financially secure.
            Little Women had set the direction, and Alcott continued a heavy literary production in the same vein. She wrote An Old-fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Work (1873), an account of her early efforts to help support the family. During this time she was active in the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage, and she also toured Europe. In 1876 she produced Silver Pitchers, a collection containing "Transcendental Wild Oats," an account of her father's disastrous attempts to found a communal group at Fruitlands, Mass. In later life she produced a book almost every year and never wanted for an audience.
            Alcott died on March 6, 1888, in Boston. She seems never to have become bitter about her early years or her dreamy, improvident father, but she did go so far as to say that a philosopher was like a man up in a balloon: he was safe as long as three women held the ropes on the ground.
  - YourDictionary 

• Little Women draws heavily from her own life, she initially didn’t want to write it, and she wrote it in under three months:
            Louisa May Alcott took inspiration from her childhood memories and family members, basing Little Women‘s Meg  on her oldest sister, Anna (an actress, who met her own “John Brooke”, John Bridge Pratt, playing opposite him in local theatre production). Alcott’s third sister, the gentle Lizzie (Elizabeth), contracted scarlet fever from a poor family she was helping, and died two years later, weakened despite her recovery, like her fictional counterpart Beth March. She was just 22. The youngest, May (Abigail), was an ambitious artist like Amy. And Alcott herself was a tomboy, a writer, an independent woman, like Jo March. But it was Alcott, not her father, who went to the Civil War; she enlisted as a nurse, but sadly, contracted typhoid fever during her service, and was plagued with health problems (long attributed to the mercury compound used to treat her illness, but in more recent years, speculated to be from the autoimmune disease lupus) for the remainder of her life.
            She wrote Little Women in under three months. In fact, Louisa May Alcott wrote the first half—402 pages—in less than six weeks!
  - MASTERPIECE

• Through her parents’ connections she knew Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She also helped her parents hide slaves who escaped via the Underground Railroad:
  Louisa's parents, Bronson and Abigail Alcott, raised their four daughters in a politically active household in Massachusetts. As a child, Alcott briefly lived with her family in a failed Transcendentalist commune, helped her parents hide slaves who had escaped via the Underground Railroad, and had discussions about women’s rights with Margaret Fuller. Throughout her life, she socialized with her father’s friends, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although her family was always poor, Alcott had access to valuable learning experiences. She read books in Emerson’s library and learned about botany at Walden Pond with Thoreau, later writing a poem called "Thoreau’s Flute" for her friend. She also socialized with abolitionist Frederick Douglass and women’s suffrage activist Julia Ward Howe.
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• She used two pennames: Flora Fairfield for her first published works, and A.M. Barenard when she published Gothic pulp fiction:
  As a teenager, Alcott worked a variety of teaching and servant jobs to earn money for her family. She first became a published writer at 19 years old, when a women’s magazine printed one of her poems. For reasons that are unclear, Alcott used a pen name—Flora Fairfield—rather than her real name, perhaps because she felt that she was still developing as a writer. But in 1854 at age 22, Alcott used her own name for the first time. She published Flower Fables, a collection of fairy tales she had written six years earlier for Emerson’s daughter, Ellen. She secretly wrote pulp fiction. Before writing Little Women, Alcott wrote Gothic pulp fiction under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard. Continuing her amusing penchant for alliteration, she wrote books and plays called Perilous Play and Pauline’s Passion and Punishment to make easy money. These sensational, melodramatic works are strikingly different than the more wholesome, righteous vibe she captured in Little Women, and she didn’t advertise her former writing as her own after Little Women became popular.
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• She wrote about her experiences as a Civil War nurse and suffered from symptoms of mercury poisoning because of it, which contributed to her death at 55 years old:
  In 1861, at the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, Alcott sewed Union uniforms in Concord and, the next year, enlisted as an army nurse. In a Washington, D.C. hotel-turned-hospital, she comforted dying soldiers and helped doctors perform amputations. During this time, she wrote about her experiences in her journal and in letters to her family. In 1863, she published Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized account, based on her letters, of her stressful yet meaningful experiences as a wartime nurse. The book became massively popular and was reprinted in 1869 with more material. After a month and a half of nursing in D.C., Alcott caught typhoid fever and pneumonia. She received the standard treatment at the time—a toxic mercury compound called calomel. (Calomel was used in medicines through the 19th century.) Because of this exposure to mercury, Alcott suffered from symptoms of mercury poisoning for the rest of her life. She had a weakened immune system, vertigo, and had episodes of hallucinations. To combat the pain caused by the mercury poisoning (as well as a possible autoimmune disorder, such as lupus, that could have been triggered by it), she took opium. Alcott died of a stroke in 1888, at 55 years old.
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• She wrote Little Women to help her father persuade the publisher to get his own philosophy manuscript published:
  In 1867, Thomas Niles, an editor at a publishing house, asked Alcott if she wanted to write a novel for girls. Although she tried to get excited about the project, she thought she wouldn’t have much to write about girls because she was a tomboy. The next year, Alcott’s father was trying to convince Niles to publish his manuscript about philosophy. He told Niles that his daughter could write a book of fairy stories, but Niles still wanted a novel about girls. Niles told Alcott’s father that if he could get his daughter to write a (non-fairy) novel for girls, he would publish his philosophy manuscript. So to make her father happy and help his writing career, Alcott wrote about her adolescence growing up with her three sisters. Published in September 1868, the first part of Little Women was a huge success. The second part was published in 1869, and Alcott went on to write sequels such as Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886).
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• She was an early suffragette:
  In the 1870s, Alcott wrote for a women’s rights periodical and went door-to-door in Massachusetts to encourage women to vote. In 1879, the state passed a law that would allow women to vote in local elections on anything involving education and children—Alcott registered immediately, becoming the first woman registered in Concord to vote. Although met with resistance, she, along with 19 other women, cast ballots in an 1880 town meeting. The Nineteenth Amendment was finally ratified in 1920, decades after Alcott died.
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• She pretended to be her own servant to trick her fans:
  After the success of Little Women, fans who connected with the book traveled to Concord to see where Alcott grew up. One month, Alcott had a hundred strangers knock on the door of Orchard House, her family’s home, hoping to see her. Because she didn’t like the attention, she sometimes pretended to be a servant when she answered the front door, hoping to trick fans into leaving.
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• She never married or had any biological children, but her youngest sister died giving birth and Alcott helped care for the girl, named Louisa in honor of Alcott, until Alcott died:
  Although Alcott never married or had biological children, she took care of her orphaned niece. In 1879, Alcott’s youngest sister May died a month after giving birth to her daughter. As she was dying, May told her husband to send the baby, whom she had named Louisa in honor of Alcott, to her older sister. Nicknamed Lulu, the girl spent her childhood with Alcott, who wrote her stories and seemed a good fit for her high-spiritedness. Lulu was just 8 when Alcott died, at which point she went to live with her father in Switzerland.
  - Mental Floss, 10 Little Facts About Louisa May Alcott 

• He wrote to pay off his gambling debts. Dostoyevsky faced financial struggles throughout his life, due in no small part to what a modern psychologist would have deemed a debilitating gambling addiction. In one particular incident, he agreed to write a novel to pay off his debts, agreeing to a contract that would give his publisher that rights to all of Dostoyevsky’s previously published work for nine years if he failed to produce a novel by November 1 of that year. (source)

• He wrote a novel in 26 days. As a result of entering into the undeniably questionable contract above, Dostoyevsky was forced to set aside his work on what would become Crime and Punishment (which he knew he could not finish by the deadline) in order to churn out, as quickly as possible, another novel appropriately called The Gambler (1867). For those keeping score at home, that’s five days slower than Jack Kerouac’s writing of On the Road (1857). (source)

• His work inspired Ralph Ellison. Dostoyevsky’s influence can hardly be quantified, and any existential author of the past century and half owes a debt to his writings. But in addition to helping to pave the way for the likes of Sartre and Camus, Dostoyevsky also had a huge, direct influence on Ralph Ellison. To wit, the narrator (and structure) of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is directly modeled after Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. (source)

• He was part of a mock execution. After the publication and warm reception of his first novel at the age of 25, Dostoyevsky joined a liberal, atheist discussion group that was accused of conspiring against Tsar Nicolas I. Attempting to make exemplars of the group, the Tsar sentenced the lot of them to death by firing squad. Before the actual execution, however, it was apparently arranged that each convict would undergo a symbolic beheading, with a fake sword broken over each one’s head. This done, the firing squad prepared to shoot—but was called off at the very last second by an envoy from the Tsar conveying a stay of execution. The group of dissidents, Dostoyevsky included, were sentenced instead to hard labor in Siberia. Hard labor which did not go well for Dostoyevsky because… (source)

• He was epileptic. As such, he was given to frequent seizures during his four years in the penal colony. The seizures had not been entirely unknown to Dostoyevsky at that point, and they would return later in his life as his health began to fail. His epilepsy did, however, seemingly influence the creation of his novel The Idiot (1869), which follows the doings of a Christ-like epileptic journeying through Russia. (source)

• Tsar Alexander II wanted him to tutor his children. While Tsar Nicolas I obviously had, on the whole, a negative relationship with Dostoyevsky, the great writer’s eventual fame apparently made him much more palatable to the tsarist regime. In fact, Nicolas’ successor, Tsar Alexander II once ordered Dostoyevsky to give a reading at his palace, insisting afterwards that Dostoyevsky tutor the monarch’s sons—an appreciable improvement over the writer’s treatment at the hands of Nicolas I. Though, perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked by Alexander’s comparative liberality, considering that it was he who finally emancipated Russia’s serfs. (source)

• Vladimir Nabokov hated him. To be fair, Nabokov hated a lot of things: jazz, public pools, psychoanalysis, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, etc. But Nabokov, arguably one of the greatest Russian novelists of all time (for certain definitions of “Russian”; his best works were certainly written in English after he moved to America), apparently also had a bone to pick with Dostoyevsky’s writing. He seemed to think of the writer’s oeuvre as being petty and juvenile, summing up Crime and Punishment with an offhanded “Who cares?” Luckily, Nabokov’s assessment hasn’t done much damage to Dostoyevsky’s reputation in the long term. (source)

• Born November 22, 1869 in Paris, France and died on February 19, 1951 in Paris at age 81. (source)

• Andre Gide was a French writer and moralist popular for his fiction and autobiographical works. He was a controversial figure and his life and views on moral, political and religious matters were better known than his literary works. As a young man emerging from the Mallarme circle of Symbolist poets, he wrote majorly for a small, discerning group of initiates. He presented to the public, the variance as well as the mergence between the two sides of his own personality ripped apart by the education and the constricted level of ethics on which the society runs. He also portrayed social justice in much of his works. Gide’s literary works are inseparable from human’s life as they reveal man’s true form, the one which is usually hidden behind the societal mask. While confining himself to prose, he derived much life and form from its substance and expressed his underlying thoughts indirectly with artistic discretion. Gide is modern as well as contemporary in his approach, providing lucidity and discursiveness to his writings. His definitions of art are shrewd yet still relevant and they always remain intact, lively and permanent. In politics, he impeded pursuing communism after a veil was lifted up from his eyes on his visit to USSR in 1936. (source)

• He was born into a middle-class protestant family to a Law Professor at the University of Paris, Paul Gide and his wife Juliette Rondeaux. He received his early education at home before moving to the school. (source)

• At the age of 8, he enrolled in Ecole Alsacienne in Paris but his health conditions didn’t permit him to have a continual education. As a result, he was instructed by private tutors at home. (source)

• In 1880, his father left for heavenly abode and he was raised up by his mother who was devoutly concerned about him. He received tuition from his mother’s governess as well as private tutors. (source)

• In 1891, he published his novel, Les Cahiers d'Andre Walter (The Notebooks of Andre Walter). It was well received by his friend, Pierre Louys, a French novelist and poet, who introduced him to the works of Stephane Mallarme, a major French Symbolist poet. (source)

• In 1893 and 1893, he embarked on a journey to North Africa where he became acquainted with the life and practices of the Arab world which liberated him from the restrictive and pointless Victorian convictions at social and sexual levels. His growing awareness of his homosexuality made him accept the need to follow his own impulses and the open atmosphere that offered him the much-needed encouragement. (source)

• In 1895, he met Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, in Algiers, who became his close friends and further encouraged him to accept his homosexuality without any hint of guilt. (source)

• In early 1896, he was elected as a Mayor of a commune in Normandy, La Roque–Baignard and became the youngest Mayor ever. In the same year, he completed his book, ‘Fruits of the Earth’, which was published a year later but not well-received. By the end of the First World War it became one of his most influential works. (source)

• In 1918, he met Dorothy Bussy, an English novelist and translator, who was his long-time friend. She assisted him in translating his works to English, being originally in French. (source)

• In 1920’s, he gained much popularity and highly influenced writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as several young writers of that time. (source)

• During July 1926 to May 1927, he travelled extensively through the French Equatorial Africa colony going to Middle Congo, Oubangui-Chari, Chad and Cameroun before returning to France. He penned down his travelling experiences in the journals called, ‘Voyage au Congo’ (Travels in the Congo) and ‘Retour du Tchad’ (Return from Chad). At that time, his books had a big impact on anti-colonialism movements in France. (source)

• In 1930s, he embraced communism for a brief period but his ideologies and perception regarding it received a severe blow when he was invited on a Soviet Union tour as a guest of the ‘Soviet Union of Writers’. He criticized communism in his book ‘Retour de L’U.R.S.S’ in 1936. He also contributed an essay in ‘The God That Failed’, a book which collected testimonies of several famous ex-communist writers and journalists. (source)

• In 1942, he left for Africa and resided in Tunis until the end of the Second World War. He wrote ‘Theseus’ there whose story showcased his realization of the value of the past. (source)

• In 1908, he founded a literary magazine, ‘La Nouvelle Revue Francaise’ (The New French Review) along with Jacques Copeau and Jean Sclumber. (source)

• In 1923, he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian novelist, short-story writer and essayist. In the following year, with the publication of ‘Corydon’, he was greatly condemned. The book was based on homosexuality in which he defended pederasty. (source)

• In 1924, he published his autobiography, ‘Si le grain ne meurt’ (Unless the seed dies). It was based on those themes which obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his famous classical novels, ‘The Immoralist’ and ‘The Counterfeiters’ (source)

• In June 1947, he was honored by the University of Oxford which conferred on him the ‘Doctor of Letters’, a higher doctorate degree for his outstanding achievement and original contribution to the writing. (source)

• In November 1947, he received the ‘Nobel Prize in Literature’ for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings in which human psyche were portrayed with keen psychological insight. (source)

• In 1895, he married his cousin Madaleine Rondeaux but the marriage was an unconsummated one due to his dissimilar sexual orientation. She died in 1938 and thereafter became the subject of his book ‘Et Nunc Manet in Te’. (source)

• In 1916, he began a relationship with 15 year old boy, Marc Allegret., who was the son of the best man at his wedding, Elie Allegret. He adopted Marc and fled to London along with him. (source)

• In 1923, he fathered a daughter with a much younger Elisabeth van Rysselberghe who was the daughter of his closest female friend Maria Monnom. He christened his daughter Catherine. (source)

• His works were placed on the ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum’ (Index of Forbidden Books) by Roman Catholic Church in 1952. (source)

• Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, (born June 18 [June 6, old style], 1812, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk], Russia—died Sept. 27 [Sept. 15, O.S.], 1891, St. Petersburg), Russian novelist and travel writer, whose highly esteemed novels dramatize social change in Russia and contain some of Russian literature’s most vivid and memorable characters. (source)

• Goncharov was born into a wealthy merchant family and, after graduating from Moscow University in 1834, served for nearly 30 years as an official, first in the Ministry of Finance and afterward in the Ministry of Censorship. The only unusual event in his uneventful life was his voyage to Japan made in 1852–55 as secretary to a Russian admiral; this was described in Fregat Pallada (1858; “The Frigate Pallas”). (source)

• Goncharov’s most notable achievement lies in his three novels, of which the first was Obyknovennaya istoriya (1847; A Common Story, 1917), a novel that immediately made his reputation when it was acclaimed by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky. Oblomov (1859; Eng. trans., 1954), a more mature work, generally accepted as one of the most important Russian novels, draws a powerful contrast between the aristocratic and capitalistic classes in Russia and attacks the way of life based on serfdom. Its hero, Oblomov, a generous but indecisive young nobleman who loses the woman he loves to a vigorous, pragmatic friend, is a triumph of characterization. From this character derives the Russian term oblomovshchina, epitomizing the backwardness, inertia, and futility of 19th-century Russian society. Goncharov’s third novel, Obryv (1869; The Precipice, 1915), though a remarkable book, is inferior to Oblomov. (source)

• In all three novels Goncharov contrasts an easygoing dreamer with an opposing character who typifies businesslike efficiency; the contrast illumines social conditions in Russia at a time when rising capitalism and industrialization uneasily coexisted with the aristocratic traditions of old Russia. (source)

• Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. (source)

• Among his most celebrated tales are “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Shadow out of Time, all canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. (source)

• Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor. (source)

• He saw commercial success increasingly elude him in the latter period of his life, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. (source)

• He subsisted in progressively strained circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent spent by the time he died, at age 46. (source)

• When Lovecraft was three years old, his father went insane and died 5 years later, most likely from untreated syphilis. (source)

• Lovecraft’s first attempt at writing “weird fiction” he would later become famous for, is a story called “The Noble Eavesdropper.” The story, which some say he wrote at the age of six or seven, doesn’t survive. (source)

• His first published work was a letter about “astronomical matters” that was printed in The Providence Sunday Journal in 1906. (source)

• Lovecraft became a prolific letter writer and by some accounts, wrote 87,500 letters during his lifetime. He was also in the habit of dating letters 200 years earlier than the current date. (source)

• Although now considered one of the greatest early American writers of horror, Lovecraft never received his high school diploma. (source)

• Lovecraft was friends with many contemporary writers of his time, including Conan creator Robert Howard, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. (source)

• Lovecraft was once “killed” by fellow writer Bloch in the short story “Shambler  from the Stars” and later killed Bloch in turn in a story called “The Haunter of the Dark.” (source)

• He ghost wrote a story called “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” for Harry Houdini, who later commissioned Lovecraft to write a book debunking superstition, which was never finished due to Houdini’s death. (source)

• Although Lovecraft is most famous for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, he himself never used that term. He referred to his own series of interconnected mythos stories as the “Arkham Cycle.” (source)

• Lovecraft’s favorite author was Edgar Allan Poe, of whom he said, “Poe was my God of fiction.” (source)

• He influenced many writers that came after him, including Stephen King, Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman. King called Lovecraft one of his biggest influences and, “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” (source)

• Lovecraft only truly became popular after his death, when friend and fellow writer August Derleth founded Arkham House publishing to help keep Lovecraft’s work alive. (source)

• All of Lovecraft’s stories written before 1923 are now in the public domain. However, it’s not clear who owns or owned the copyright to many of his works, and the status of stories written after 1923 is disputed. (source)

• The statuette for the World Fantasy Award is a bust of Lovecraft, in honor of his writing. The award is informally referred to as a Howard. (source)

• While he died in 1937, he didn’t get his own headstone until 1977, when fans pitched in to buy one for him. (source)

• Lovecraft isn’t buried under his headstone, however, hundreds of people visit it each year to pay homage to him. (source)

• On October 13, 1997, someone tried to dig up Lovecraft’s body, not knowing that it wasn’t under the headstone. They dug down about 3 feet before giving up for unknown reasons. (source)

• Lovecraft is most celebrated for his 1926 short story, “The Call of Cthulhu.” Although he himself regarded it as, “rather middling – not as bad as the worst,” scholars like Peter Canon had hailed it, “for its dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions.” (source)

• On March 3, 1924, Lovecraft married Sonia Haft Green, a successful milliner, pulp fiction writer and an amateur publisher. She was seven years older than him and kept an apartment in Brooklyn. After the wedding, they settled down there. (source)

• At some point, Green lost her shop and became sick. Lovecraft tried to find a job, but no one was willing to hire a 34 year old man without any job experience. (source)

• On April 17, 1926, Lovecraft returned alone to Providence and stayed with his aunts. Green also wanted to settle down there and open a shop, however, his aunts wouldn’t allow it. Ultimately, they decided to get a divorce, but it never took place. (source)

• In early 1937, Lovecraft was diagnosed with cancer of the small intestine, which is what ultimately killed him. (source)

• In July 2013, the Providence City Council put a marker at the intersection of Angell and Prospect streets, designating it as “H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Square.” The Providence Athenaeum library also houses his bronze bust. (source)

• In 1984, writer Donald Wandrei caused some controversy after he was offered a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement but refused to accept it because the award was a bust of Lovecraft that he felt looked more like a caricature of him than an actual representation. (source)

• Lovecraft drew extensively from his native New England for settings in his fiction. Numerous real historical locations are mentioned, and several fictional New England locations make frequent appearances. (source)

• When Mitchell was three years old, her skirt caught fire on an iron grate. Paranoid that it would happen again, Mitchell’s mother began dressing her in pants, earning young Mitchell the nickname “Jimmy” after the comic strip character “Little Jimmy.” Mitchell would say she was a boy named Jimmy till she was fourteen years old. (source)

• Mitchell began writing at a very early age. She even bound her own books and added covers. At age eleven, she started her own “publishing company” called Urchin Publishing Co. Mitchell would later write her stories in bound notebooks. (source)

• During her adolescence, Mitchell wrote a novel called The Big Four about girls in boarding school. The manuscript is thought to be lost; Mitchell destroyed some manuscripts herself, and others were destroyed after she passed away. (source)

• An apathetic student, Mitchell had vague aspirations of entering psychiatry. But when her mother died during the 1918 flu pandemic, Mitchell left Smith College and went home to run the household for her father and brother. (source)

• Mitchell called herself an “unscrupulous flirt” and was well known for her coquettishness in Atlanta social circles. Advice columnist Polly Peachtree wrote of Mitchell in 1922, “She has in her brief life, perhaps had more men really truly ‘dead in love’ with her, more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.” (source)

• In the early 1920’s, Mitchell began collecting erotica at New York City bookshops. She and her friends were interested in “all forms of sexual expression.” In a letter to her friend Harney Smith, Mitchell names Fanny Hill and Aphrodite among her favorite books. During this same time period, she was already writing Gone with the Wind. (source)

• Mitchell suffered an ankle injury that ended her career as a journalist. Her husband John Marsh would bring armloads of books home from the library to entertain her during convalescence. One day he brought home a Remington Portable No 3 typewriter and suggested she write her own book. She immediately started working on a Civil War-era novel with a protagonist named Patsy O'Hara, occasionally using parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch. (source)

• Approximately 14,000 actresses were interviewed for the role of Scarlett O'Hara, and 400 were invited to do readings. For more publicity, fans were invited to vote for their favorite actresses–and Vivian Leigh received only one vote. But Margaret Mitchell personally approved the choice. (source)

• World War II inspired Mitchell to volunteer for the American Red Cross. She sold war bonds, sewed hospital gowns, and put patches on soldiers’ trousers. But Mitchell’s most important responsibility was writing letters of encouragement to soldiers. (source)

• Mitchell sponsored the Atlanta anti-aircraft ship used in the Battle of Midway. It sank during the Battle of Guadalcanal. She sponsored a second ship, the USS Atlanta, which was christened on February 6, 1944. It, too, sank, during an explosives test off San Clemente Island in October, 1970. (source)

• Edgar Allan Poe influenced writers like:

  • Tanizaki (source)

  • Akutgawa (source)

  • Ranpo (source)

• Poe’s works were some of the first American literature to be introduced to Japan (source)

• Poe called himself “Eddy” (source)

• He competed in running, boxing and long jump events as a teen. (source)

• Poe was engaged to his teenage girlfriend twice (source)

• Poe had a rival, the literary editor/critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold.  (source)

• Griswold invented Poe’s “madman” reputation after his death (source)

• Poe was not an opium addict (source)

• No one knows how Poe died (source)

• Edgar Alan Poe dabbled in cryptography (source)

• "Allan” wasn’t originally part of his name (source)

• His death was a mystery worthy of his writing (source)

• An early draft of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog. It was Max, one of several dogs Steinbeck owned during his life, who devoured the novel’s draft and so became, in effect, the book’s first critic. This is probably Steinbeck’s most famous novel, and draws on his own experiences as a ‘bindlestiff’ (or migratory worker) in the US in the 1920s. The novel’s title famously comes from the Robert Burns poem ‘To a Mouse’: ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley’ (or ‘go often awry’). The original title of the novella was ‘Something That Happened’. (We have more interesting facts about Of Mice and Men here.) (source)

• In the 1980s, a rumour arose that Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath had been translated into Japanese as ‘The Angry Raisins’. This rumour was, however, false. It is a good example of how people love a good ‘lost in translation’ story, and it has been debunked numerous times. (source)

• Steinbeck used 300 pencils to write East of Eden. He was known to use up to 60 pencils in a day, preferring the pencil to a typewriter or pen. Hemingway was also a fan of graphite rather than ink, though ‘Papa’ apparently also enjoyed sharpening pencils while he was working on a novel, to help him think! (We have more great facts about Hemingway here.) (source)

• Steinbeck wrote a book about King Arthur. It’s an unlikely topic for the author of Depression-era novels, but Steinbeck’s sortie into Arthurian fantasy was penned late in his career. Like T. H. White (who wrote the sequence The Once and Future King, beginning with The Sword in the Stone) and Tennyson (who wrote a long verse-novel, Idylls of the King, in the nineteenth century), Steinbeck drew on Sir Thomas Malory’s vast fifteenth-century prose epic, Le Morte d’Arthur, for his source material. Steinbeck’s Arthurian fantasy was The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. Begun in 1956, the book was left unfinished upon Steinbeck’s death in 1968, and was not published until 1976. (source)

• He wrote one of the finest love letters in all of literature – a letter about falling in love. In this letter of 1958, Steinbeck responds to a letter his son Thom had written to him. Thom had told his father that he had fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan (at this time, Thom was away at boarding school). Steinbeck’s tone is supportive and honest throughout, taking his son’s feelings into account but also offering advice on ‘what to do about it’ – surely what every teenager in the first pangs of a love affair wants to know. ‘The object of love is the best and most beautiful,’ he tells Thom. ‘Try to live up to it.’ He ends the letter by assuring his son, ‘And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.’ You can read the letter in full here. (source)

• Jules Verne grew up surrounded by ships. On February 8, 1828, Pierre and Sophie Verne welcomed their first child, Jules Gabriel, at Sophie’s mother’s home in Nantes, a city in western France. Verne’s birthplace had a profound impact on his writing. In the 19th century, Nantes was a busy port city that served as a major hub for French shipbuilders and traders, and Verne’s family lived on Ile Feydeau, a small, man-made island in a tributary of the Loire River. Verne spent his childhood watching ships sail down the Loire and imagining what it would be like to climb aboard them. He would later work these early memories of maritime life into his writing. (source) 

• Verne’s father pressured him to be a lawyer. While Verne had been passionate about writing since his early teens, his father strongly encouraged young Jules to follow in his footsteps and enter the legal profession. Soon after Tronson’s marriage, Verne’s father capitalized on his son’s depression, convincing him to move to Paris to study law. Verne graduated with a law degree in 1851. But he kept writing fiction during this period, and continued to clash with his father over his career path. In 1852, Verne’s father arranged for him to practice law in Nantes, but Verne decided to pursue life as a writer instead. (source)

• Verne lived in Paris, but his time in Paris coincided with a period of intense political instability. The French Revolution of 1848 broke out soon after Verne moved to the city to study law. Though he didn’t participate, he was strikingly close to the conflict and its turbulent aftermath, including the coup d'état that ended France’s Second Republic. “On Thursday the fighting was intense; at the end of my street, houses were knocked down by cannon fire,” he wrote to his mother during the fighting that followed the coup in December 1851. Verne managed to stay out of the political upheaval during those years, but his writing later explored themes of governmental strife. In his 1864 novella The Count of Chanteleine: A Tale of the French Revolution, Verne wrote about the struggles of ordinary and noble French people during the French Revolutionary Wars, while his novel The Flight to France recounted the wartime adventures of an army captain in 1792. (source)

• He drew inspiration from his own sailing adventures. During the 1860s, Verne’s career was taking off, and he was making good money. So in 1867, he bought a small yacht, which he named the Saint Michel, after his son, Michel. When he wasn’t living in Amiens, he spent time sailing around Europe to the Channel Islands, along the English Coast, and across the Bay of Biscay. Besides enjoying the peace and quiet at sea, he also worked during these sailing trips, writing most of the manuscripts for Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea on his yacht. As he earned more money, he replaced the Saint Michel with a larger boat that he called the Saint Michel II. A few years later, he bought a third vessel, the Saint Michel III, a steam yacht that he hired a crew of 10 to man on long voyages to Scotland and through the Mediterranean. (source)

• Verne is one of the most translated authors in the world. Verne wrote in French, but his works have always had an international appeal. Since the 1850s, his writing has been translated into approximately 150 languages—making him the second most translated author ever. He has appeared in translation even more often than William Shakespeare. He is second only to Agatha Christie, who holds the world record. (source)

• Not all the translations of his work are accurate. Although Verne wrote primarily for adults, many English-language publishers considered his science fiction writing to be juvenile and marketed his books to children. Translators dumbed down his work, simplifying stories, cutting heavily researched passages, summarizing dialogue, and in some cases, nixing anything that might be construed as a critique of the British Empire. Many translations even contain outright errors, such as measurements converted incorrectly. Some literary historians now bemoan the shoddy translations of many of Verne’s works, arguing that almost all of these early English translations feature significant changes to both plot and tone. Even today, these poor translations make up much of Verne’s available work in English. But anglophone readers hoping to read more authentic versions of his stories are in luck. Thanks to scholarly interest, there has been a recent surge in new Verne translations that aim to be more faithful to the original texts. (source)

• Verne had major health problems. Starting in his twenties, Verne began experiencing sudden bouts of extreme stomach pain. He wrote about his agonizing stomach cramps in letters to family members, but he failed to get a proper diagnosis from doctors. To try to ease his pain, he experimented with different diets, including one in which he ate only eggs and dairy. Historians believe that Verne may have had colitis or a related digestion disorder. Even more unsettling than the stomach pain, Verne suffered from five episodes of facial paralysis over the course of his life. During these painful episodes, one side of his face suddenly became immobile. After the first attack, doctors treated his facial nerve with electric stimulation, but he had another attack five years later, and several more after that. Recently, researchers have concluded that he had Bell’s palsy, a temporary form of one-sided facial paralysis caused by damage to the facial nerve. Doctors have hypothesized that it was the result of ear infections or inflammation, but no one knows for sure why he experienced this. Verne developed type-2 diabetes in his fifties, and his health declined significantly in the last decade of his life. He suffered from high blood pressure, chronic dizziness, tinnitus, and other maladies, and eventually went partially blind. (source)

• His work contributed to the rise of steampunk. Verne’s body of work heavily influenced steampunk, the science fiction subgenre that takes inspiration from 19th century industrial technology. Some of Verne’s characters, as well as the fictional machines he wrote about, have appeared in prominent steampunk works. For example, the TV show The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne explored the idea that Verne actually experienced the fantastic things he wrote about, and Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea appeared as a character in the comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. (source)

• Many of his predications were surprisingly spot on. Some of the technology Verne imagined in his fiction later became reality. One of the machines that Verne dreamed up, Nautilus—the electric submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea—came to life years after he first wrote about it. The first installment of the serialized Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was published in 1869, and the first battery-powered submarines were launched in the 1880s. (Similar submarine designs are still in use today.) In addition, Verne’s Paris In The Twentieth Century contains several surprisingly accurate technological predictions. Written in 1863, the dystopian novel imagines a tech-obsessed Parisian society in 1960. Verne wrote about skyscrapers, elevators, cars with internal combustion engines, trains, electric city lights, and suburbs. He was massively ahead of his time. He even wrote about a group of mechanical calculators (as in, computers) that could communicate with one another over a network (like the Internet). Pretty impressive for a guy born in 1828. But Verne’s influence goes beyond science fiction, steampunk, or real-world technology. His writing has inspired countless authors in genres ranging from poetry to travel to adventure. As Ray Bradbury wrote, “We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.” (source)

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

• Akutagawa references Dostoevsky's House of the Head in one of his autobiographical short stories:
  He hated school, of course. He especially hated middle school with all its restrictions. How cruel the gatekeeper’s bugle sounded to him! How melancholy was the color of the thick poplars on the school grounds! There Shinsuke studied only useless minutiae - the dates of Western history, chemical equations for which they did no experiments, the populations of the cities of Europe and America. With a little effort, this could be relatively painless work, but he could not forget the fact that it was all useless minutiae. In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky says that a prisoner forced to do such useless work as pouring water from bucket number 1 into bucket number 2 and back again would eventually commit suicide. In the rat-gray schoolhouse, amid the rustling of the tall poplars, Shinsuke felt the mental anguish that such a prisoner would experience.
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

• Akutagawa was familiar with Dostoevsky's works and referenced Crime and Punishment in another autobiographical short story:
  ‘The complete works of Dostoevsky. Have you read ‘Crime and Punishment’?’ I had of course become familiar with four or five Dostoevsky novels some ten years earlier. But I found myself moved by the title ‘Crime and Punishment’ which he had just happened (?) to mention, and so I asked him to lend it to me as I was leaving for my hotel… Thinking of Raskolnikov, I felt the desire to confess everything I had done…
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears”

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Dazai Osamu

• No Longer Human is similar to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:
  After Yozo moves to Tokyo, he is captivated by the combination of the allure of women and alcoholic mirth, yet his enjoyment of life soon dissipates as he develops an alcohol addiction, and even the love of women does little to alleviate his internal suffering. The work recalls Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground,” another novel about a misanthropic young man alienated from society and sickened by humanity in general.
  - "No Longer Human" by William Bradbury, The Japan Times

• Dazai refers to Dostoevsky in No Longer Human and a letter to Kawabata Yasunari:
  Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and 'punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind—no, I still didn’t quite see … Such thoughts were flashing through my head like a revolving lantern…
  - Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 147
  Is breeding exotic birds and going to see the dance, Mr Kawabata, really such an exemplary lifestyle? I’ll stab him! That is what I thought. The man’s an utter swine, I thought. But then, suddenly, I felt the twisted, hot, passionate love that you bore towards me – a love such as that of Nellie in Dostoyevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured – fill me to my very core. It can’t be! It can’t be! I shook my head in denial. But your love, beneath your affected coldness – violent, deranged, Dostoyevskian love – made my body burn as with fever. And, what’s more, you did not know a thing about it.
  - Dazai Osamu, “Letter to Kawabata Yusanari” 

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edogawa Ranpo

• Ranpo referenced Crime and Punishment in his famous short story "The Psychological Test":
  …he was now determined to take possession of the old woman’s money. But there were still certain details which had to be figured out before he could make his first move. One of these was the all-important problem of how to divert even the faintest suspicion from himself. Other questions, such as remorse and the attendant pangs of conscience, troubled him not in the least. All this talk of Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, crucified by the unseen terrors of a haunted heart was, to [him] sheet nonsense. After all, he reasoned, everything depended on one’s point of view.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “The Psychological Test”

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Higuchi Ichiyō

• Higuchi read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment:
  …Ichiyō began to read not only the translations appearing in Bungakkai, but ‘Macbeth,’ a life of Schiller, and ‘Crime and Punishment.’ Her diary, skimpy by now, provides no clue as to what these readings of foreign literature might have meant to her, and it is hard to find anything in her later worlds that reveals specific foreign influence. It is nevertheless tempting to attribute the remarkable development in Ichiyō’s work at the time to such an influence.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 178

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Kunikida Doppo

• Kunikida and Katai read Dostoevsky:
  Katai related that when he and Doppo discussed foreign literature they invariably touched on Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, and Daudet. He shared Doppo’s enthusiasm for Russian literature, but he was attracted especially to French literature, above all to Maupassant.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 243

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Tayama Katai

• Kunikida and Katai read Dostoevsky:
  Katai related that when he and Doppo discussed foreign literature they invariably touched on Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, and Daudet. He shared Doppo’s enthusiasm for Russian literature, but he was attracted especially to French literature, above all to Maupassant.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 243

• Katai read Dostoevsky:
  It was… the frankness of Zola’s works which [Katai] admired, and in this respect he also developed an admiration for Tolstroy, translating the English version of The Cossacks into Japanese as early as 1893. He also read Chekhov, Daudet, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and a whole host of other Western writers…
  - The Introduction of Tayama Katai’s The Quilt and Other Stories