Books and Art

.

  • The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan"


  • Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice."


  • Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting while he was alive, Red Vineyard at Arles.


  • Ballroom dancing is a major at Brigham Young University.


  • Virgina Woolf wrote all her books standing.


  • Samuel Clemens's pseudonym "Mark Twain" was the nickname of a riverboat pilot about whom Clemens wrote a needless nasty satirical piece. Apparently, Clemens felt guilt later and adopted the name as a nom de plume as some sort of expiation. The phrase does not mean measuring the depth of the river; it means a specific depth, to wit, two fathoms (twelve feet.)


  • Sylvia Plath was a famous poet who killed herself at age 31 by sticking her head in an oven.


  • Sylvia Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, was married three times, and two of the women he married committed suicide.


  • First novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.


  • It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear.


  • Both writer Edgar Allen Poe and LSD advocate Timothy Leary were kicked out of West Point.


  • The "Calabash" pipe, most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, was not used by him until William Gillette (an American) portrayed Holmes onstage. Gillette needed a pipe he could keep in his mouth while he spoke his lines.


  • The only person ever to decline a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Sinclair Lewis for his book Arrowsmith.


  • Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category.


  • Vincent Van Gogh comitted suicide while painting Wheat Field with Crows.


  • Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.


  • Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life.


  • Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born on a day in 1835 when Haley's Comet came into veiw. When He died in 1910, Haley's Comet came into view again.


  • The Velvet Underground was named after a book on the S&M culture.