50 Fun Facts About Authors

Which Dr. Seuss book was written after his editor bet him he couldn't use only 50 different words?

Green Eggs and Ham won Dr. Seuss a $50 wager with his editor, Bennett Cerf. His earlier hit about a mischievous cat had needed 236 different words.

Which author was unmasked in 2013 as Robert Galbraith, the supposed first-time writer of The Cuckoo's Calling?

J.K. Rowling was revealed by The Sunday Times that July. The detective novel then surged from 4,709th place to the best-selling novel on Amazon.

Which debut Stephen King novel was rescued from the trash by his wife Tabitha after he gave up on it?

Carrie survived because Tabitha King retrieved its first three pages and persuaded her husband to keep going. The family was living in a trailer in Maine at the time.

Which author conceived Frankenstein during a ghost-story contest proposed by Lord Byron near Lake Geneva?

Mary Shelley grew anxious when she could not think of a story, until the idea arrived in a waking dream after midnight. She was still a teenager that summer of 1816.

Which crime novelist, creator of Hercule Poirot, made headlines by vanishing for 11 days in 1926?

Agatha Christie was found at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under the surname of her husband's lover. Doctors diagnosed a loss of memory, and opinion remains divided on why she vanished.

Which children's author was a wartime RAF fighter pilot before writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Roald Dahl scored five aerial victories in the Second World War, enough to qualify as a flying ace. He went on to serve as an intelligence officer.

Which American author took his pen name from a riverboat leadsman's cry for two fathoms of water?

Mark Twain was the call for a depth of 12 feet, which meant safe water for a steamboat. Samuel Clemens learned it while working as a pilot on the Mississippi.

Which J.R.R. Tolkien book began as a single sentence scribbled on a blank exam paper he was marking?

The Hobbit grew from that idle line into a finished story by late 1932, which Tolkien then lent to friends. He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon at the time.

Which spy novelist borrowed the name of his famous hero from the author of a Caribbean bird guide?

Ian Fleming, a keen birdwatcher, owned Birds of the West Indies by the American ornithologist James Bond. He wanted a name for his agent that sounded as ordinary as possible.

Which author based Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on her childhood neighbour Truman Capote?

Harper Lee grew up next door to the young Capote, who stayed with his aunts while his mother was in New York City. Like Dill, he had a gift for fascinating stories.

Which George Orwell book retells the Russian Revolution through rival leaders named Napoleon and Snowball?

Animal Farm was, in Orwell's own words, intended primarily as a satire on the revolution. Its prize boar Old Major stands in for both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

Which English playwright's will famously left his wife Anne his second-best bed with the furniture?

William Shakespeare added the bequest between the lines of his will, and what he meant by it is still uncertain. The rest of his household goods went to his daughter Susanna and her husband.

Which Victorian novelist worked in a boot-blacking factory at 12 while his father sat in debtors' prison?

Charles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot polish. He later drew on his father's time in the Marshalsea prison for Little Dorrit.

Which author of Emma published her books anonymously, the first described only as written "By a Lady"?

Jane Austen saw four novels reach print without her name on them, and they brought her no public fame in her lifetime. Sense and Sensibility came first, in 1811.

Which H.G. Wells novel did Orson Welles stage on radio in 1938 as a series of fake news bulletins?

The War of the Worlds convinced some listeners that Martians really were invading, though the scale of the panic is disputed. Welles apologised at a news conference the next morning.

Which Edinburgh-born doctor killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, only to revive him later?

Arthur Conan Doyle wanted more time for his historical novels, so in 1893 he sent the detective over the falls with Professor Moriarty. Holmes was back in print eight years later.

Which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel sold poorly until free copies were sent to American soldiers in World War II?

The Great Gatsby had sold fewer than 20,000 copies within months of its 1925 release. About 155,000 copies later went to troops overseas, and its popularity surged.

Which novelist published Wuthering Heights, the only novel she wrote, under the pen name Ellis Bell?

Emily Brontë chose a pseudonym that kept her own initials, as her sisters did with Currer and Acton Bell. She died in 1848, aged 30, a year after the book came out.

Which American author drove a Red Cross ambulance in wartime Italy before writing A Farewell to Arms?

Ernest Hemingway was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918 while serving on the Italian Front. The novel's narrator, Frederic Henry, is likewise an American in the ambulance corps.

Which country was home to Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling?

Denmark is where Andersen was born, in the city of Odense in 1805. Odense now has museums devoted to him and a marathon that carries his name.

Which American author of The Raven pioneered detective fiction with his Paris sleuth C. Auguste Dupin?

Edgar Allan Poe wrote only a few Dupin stories, yet they laid the groundwork for the fictional sleuths who followed. His poem about the raven was an instant success in 1845.

Which Herman Melville novel is narrated by a sailor named Ishmael aboard the whaling ship Pequod?

Moby-Dick follows Captain Ahab's hunt for the white sperm whale that bit off his leg. Some British reviewers were puzzled, because their edition lacked the epilogue in which Ishmael survives.

Which Ray Bradbury novel grew from a story typed on a rented typewriter in a UCLA library basement?

Fahrenheit 451 began as The Fireman, typed at ten cents per half hour in UCLA's Powell Library. Bradbury went back to the same room to double its length in nine days.

Which J.D. Salinger novel is narrated by Holden Caulfield after his expulsion from Pencey Prep?

The Catcher in the Rye has Holden fail every class except English. Salinger may have modelled the Pennsylvania boarding school on the Valley Forge Military Academy.

Which French author published Les Misérables while living in exile on the Channel island of Guernsey?

Victor Hugo spent his Guernsey exile at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port and stayed on the island until 1870. The City of Paris now preserves the house as a museum.

Which French author created Captain Nemo, whose submarine Nautilus outclassed the real vessels of the 1860s?

Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas for his Voyages extraordinaires, a run of bestselling adventure novels developed with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel.

Which author of Little Women served as a Union nurse during the American Civil War?

Louisa May Alcott nursed for six weeks at a hospital in Georgetown before typhoid fever cut her service short. Her letters home became the book Hospital Sketches.

Which subject did Alice's Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll teach at Christ Church, Oxford?

Mathematics won Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, a lectureship that he held for 26 years. He was also a photographer and an Anglican deacon.

Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family from drought-stricken Oklahoma to California?

The Grapes of Wrath sends the Joads west in a Hudson sedan converted into a truck after their land is repossessed. Thousands of other families make the same journey in search of work.

Which creator of Peter Rabbit became a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep in England's Lake District?

Beatrix Potter left almost all her property to the National Trust when she died in 1943. She is credited with preserving much of the land that is now a national park.

Which Russian author of Crime and Punishment was once reprieved moments before facing a firing squad?

Fyodor Dostoevsky then spent four years in a Siberian hard labour camp. He later retold what he believed were the last moments of his life in his novel The Idiot.

Which Leo Tolstoy novel follows aristocratic families through Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia?

War and Peace is set about half a century before Tolstoy wrote it, yet he was able to talk with people who had lived through the invasion.

Which Homeric epic follows the king of Ithaca on his ten-year voyage home from the Trojan War?

The Odyssey costs its hero every one of his crewmates before he reaches home. The siege of Troy he is returning from had itself lasted ten years.

Which Spanish author lost the use of his left hand at the Battle of Lepanto before writing Don Quixote?

Miguel de Cervantes took three wounds in the 1571 sea battle against the Ottoman fleet, two of them in the chest. His part in it remained a source of pride to the end of his life.

Which Florence-born poet wrote the Divine Comedy, in which the Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell?

Dante Alighieri was condemned to perpetual exile from his home city and died in Ravenna in 1321. The city council of Florence only rescinded the sentence in 2008.

Which Geoffrey Chaucer work is framed as a contest among pilgrims bound for a saint's shrine?

The Canterbury Tales was planned at about 120 stories: two from each pilgrim on the way to Thomas Becket's shrine and two more on the way back.

Which Prague-born author told his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts unread after his death?

Franz Kafka was ignored by Brod, who published the work to eventual acclaim. That is how the novels The Trial and The Castle reached readers.

Which Gabriel García Márquez novel traces seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo?

One Hundred Years of Solitude drew its setting from the house in Aracataca where the author spent his childhood. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Which author of Beloved became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Toni Morrison won the Nobel in 1993, five years after Beloved took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She had earlier been a senior fiction editor at Random House in New York.

Which poet read On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's first presidential inauguration?

Maya Angelou was only the second poet to read at a presidential inauguration, after Robert Frost in 1961. Her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had already brought her international acclaim.

Which book, Oscar Wilde's only novel, has a hero who barters his soul to stay young and beautiful?

The Picture of Dorian Gray keeps its hero young while his portrait by Basil Hallward ages in his place. The canvas goes on to record every one of his sins.

Which James Joyce novel follows Leopold Bloom around Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904?

Ulysses is celebrated by its fans every 16 June as Bloomsday. The book was banned in the United Kingdom until 1936 and faced an obscenity trial in the United States in 1921.

Which novelist founded the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard and wrote Mrs Dalloway?

Virginia Woolf and her husband ran the press from a Bloomsbury basement from 1924, where she also had her writing room. Much of her own work was published through it.

Which Aldous Huxley novel imagines a future society whose citizens are kept placid with the drug soma?

Brave New World opens in London in the year AF 632, with the calendar counted from Henry Ford. Its citizens are grown in artificial wombs and sorted into castes.

Which Frank Herbert novel is set on the planet Arrakis, the only source of the spice melange?

Dune won the first Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966. In the story, the spice extends human youth and lifespan, which makes control of the desert world a dangerous prize.

Which Margaret Atwood novel is set in Gilead, a theocracy that has overthrown the United States government?

The Handmaid's Tale was begun in West Berlin in 1984 and finished in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Its narrator's name, Offred, simply marks the man whose household she is assigned to.

Which Chinua Achebe novel, set among the Igbo of colonial Nigeria, takes its title from a W.B. Yeats poem?

Things Fall Apart borrows a phrase from the 1919 poem The Second Coming. It was Achebe's first novel and became the most widely studied and read African novel.

Which Japanese novelist ran a Tokyo jazz bar called Peter Cat before his breakthrough with Norwegian Wood?

Haruki Murakami kept the bar from 1974 to 1981, and his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, appeared in 1979. A student café at Waseda University is now named Orange Cat after it.

Which poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, saw only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems published in her lifetime?

Emily Dickinson was rarely seen in later life and usually dressed in white. Her younger sister Lavinia discovered the hoard of poems after she died.

Which Truman Capote book reconstructs the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas?

In Cold Blood took Capote six years to write and first ran as a four-part serial in The New Yorker. He described it as a non-fiction novel.