Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Cask of Amontillado” is regarded today as a testament to his imagination, but in fact it was inspired by a feud with a literary rival. Poe and Thomas Dunn English had been friends, but they had a falling-out that descended into a fistfight in which Poe claimed to administer “a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death.” Thereafter the two caricatured one another in their writings — Poe even successfully sued English’s editors at the New York Mirror for libel in 1846.

In English’s novel 1844, the character Marmaduke Hammerhead is a veiled dig at Poe — he’s a liar and drunkard who is said to be the author of “The Black Crow” and uses phrases such as “Nevermore” and “lost Lenore.” It was in response to this novel that Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado” — the story mentions a secret society, a signal of distress, and a particular coat of arms because they all figured in English’s book. The very setting of Poe’s story derives from a scene in English’s novel that takes place in a subterranean vault.

But these associations have now been forgotten, and Poe’s story is remembered as a tale of the fantastic.

A Highwayman confronted a Traveler, and covering him with a firearm, shouted: ‘Your money or your life!’

‘My good friend,’ said the Traveler, ‘according to the terms of your demand my money will save my life, my life my money; you imply that you will take one or the other, but not both. If that is what you mean please be good enough to take my life.’

‘That is not what I mean,’ said the Highwayman; ‘you cannot save your money by giving up your life.’

‘Then take it anyhow,’ the Traveler said. ‘If it will not save my money it is good for nothing.’

The Highwayman was so pleased with the Traveler’s philosophy and wit that he took him into partnership and this splendid combination of talent started a newspaper.

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

Scottish proverbs:

• The shortest road’s the nearest.
• The less wit a man has the less he kens the want o’t.
• The gude dog doesna aye get the best bane.
• Sorrow an’ ill weather come unca’d.
• Silence and thought hurt nae man.
• Self praise is nae honour.
• Every bird thinks its ain nest best.
• He that keeks through a keyhole may see what will vex him.
• There’s naething mair precious than time.
• He that lends money to a friend has a double loss.
• Haste and anger hinder gude counsel.
• Friends ‘gree best at a distance.
• Weel done, soon done.
• Be a friend to yoursel’ and ithers will.
• A wise man wavers, a fool is fixed.
• The langest day has an end.

And “There’s naething sae gude on this side o’ time but it micht hae been better.”

(From Colin S.K. Walker, Scottish Proverbs, 2000.)

The “Swiss family Robinson” is not named Robinson. The title of Johann David Wyss’s 1812 novel shows the enormous influence of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe even a century after its publication; the 18th century was filled with “Robinsonades” in German, Dutch, French, Danish, Swiss, Swedish, and Italian:

Teutsche Robinson, 1722
Americanische Robinson, 1724
Nordische Robinson, 1741
Hollandsche Robinson, 1743
Dänische Robinson, 1750
Walchersche Robinson, 1752
Maldivschen Philosophen Robine, 1753
Oude en Jongen Robinson, 1753
Isländische Robinson, 1755
Hartz-Robinson, 1755
Robinson vom Berge Libonon, 1755
Haagsche Robinson, 1758
Robertson [sic] aux terres australes, 1766
Steyerische Robinson, 1791
Böhmische Robinson, 1796

Wyss’s marooned Swiss family is nameless.

(Gary Dexter, Why Not Catch-21?, 2007.)

[My brother Michael] remembered that I (then between four and five years old) was greatly concerned with petty consistency as the story unfolded, and that on one occasion I interrupted: ‘Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green and that Thorin’s hood was silver’, at which my father muttered ‘Damn the boy’, and then strode across the room to his desk to make a note.

— Christopher Tolkien, recalling a series of Christmas readings in the late 1920s in which The Hobbit took shape, quoted in Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 2006

For his 2017 book Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, statistician and journalist Ben Blatt ran thousands of books through a computer to analyze the particulars of the authors’ use of language. Among many other things, he found that each of these authors uses the indicated phrase in more than half their works:

• Jane Austen: “with all my heart”
• Ray Bradbury: “at long last”
• Tom Clancy: “by a whisker”
• William Faulkner: “sooner or later”
• George R.R. Martin: “black as pitch”
• Herman Melville: “through and through”
• Salman Rushdie: “the last straw”
• Tom Wolfe: “sinking feeling”

A few other interesting points:

• Ernest Hemingway used -ly adverbs only 80 times in 10 novels. By contrast, E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey) used 155 instances in three books.
• Elmore Leonard used 49 exclamation points per 100,000 words. James Joyce used 1,105.
• Chuck Palahniuk uses the word suddenly twice per 100,000 words. J.R.R. Tolkien used it 78 times.
• 45 percent of American Harry Potter fan fiction used the word brilliant more often than J.K Rowling.
• 46 percent of Danielle Steele’s opening sentences mention weather. Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Palahniuk never do this.

Literary scholar Robert Hauptman calls this “marginal emendation run amok” — it’s a page from Henry James’ 1877 novel The American as James revised it anxiously for a new edition in 1907. He had decided the plot was unconvincing and asked for so many changes that two copies of the book had to be inlaid page by page on larger sheets to give him room to mark all the revisions.

On the last page, above, “James has partially or fully crossed out 16 of the 19 lines and rewritten the text for the definitive New York edition in the margins and at the foot of the page,” notes Hauptman. “His scrawling alterations cover virtually all of the generous white space and must be inserted in at least three different locations in the original text. Words are blotted out or struck in the new version, and as he approaches the bottom of the page, the lettering diminishes in size, because he realizes that he will run out of room.”

“The work on the earlier novels has involved much labour — to the best effect for the vile things, I’m convinced,” James had written to Grace Norton that March. Modern critics generally disagree — most editions today use the original version.

(From Robert Hauptman, Documentation, 2008, and Harvard’s Marks in Books, 1985.)