Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell wrote one novel apiece. Both won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Turning Point and The Color Purple each received 11 Oscar nominations — and won zero.
Literature
Nothing Doing
Deluged with mail after his discovery of the double helix, Francis Crick began sending a printed card in response to invitations:
He modeled it on a similar one made by Edmund Wilson:
In 1976 freelance writer Betty Eppes managed to talk to J.D. Salinger for 20 minutes. “He said he didn’t believe in giving autographs. It was a meaningless gesture. He told me never to sign my name for anyone else. It was all right for actors and actresses to sign their names, because all they had to give were their faces and names. But it was different with writers. They had their work to give. Therefore, it was cheap to give autographs. He said, Don’t you ever do it! No self-respecting writer should ever do it.”
See Pen Fatigue.
Blood and Ink
“A propos of dreams, is it not a strange thing if writers of fiction never dream of their own creations; recollecting, I suppose, even in their dreams, that they have no real existence? I never dream of any of my own characters, and I feel it is so impossible that I would wager Scott never did of his, real as they are.”
— Charles Dickens, letter to C.C. Felton, Sept. 1, 1843
“The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.”
— Samuel Butler, Notebooks
“Only a few isolated figures in letters stand out as real; Sir Roger de Coverley, I suppose, Mr. Pickwick certainly, and, of course, Sherlock Holmes … Such characters, I mean, as create a real illusion; so that a man attaining Heaven might look round him and say, ‘And now, where’s Pickwick? Oh, no, I forgot; of course, he’s only a character in a book.'”
— Ronald Knox, “A Ramble in Barsetshire,” Essays in Satire, 1928
Royal Jelly
“Last night Mr. Creston Clarke played King Lear at the Tabor Grand. All through the five acts of that Shakespearean tragedy he played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the Ace.” — Eugene Field, Denver Tribune, c. 1880
Worldly Wise
Proverbs from around the world:
- A shroud has no pockets. (Scotland)
- No one is a blacksmith at birth. (Namibia)
- The absent always bears the blame. (Netherlands)
- One cannot make soup out of beauty. (Estonia)
- Bad is called good when worse happens. (Norway)
- When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole. (Gambia)
- Under trees it rains twice. (Switzerland)
- Everyone is foolish until they buy land. (Ireland)
- Every head is a world. (Cuba)
- The only victory over love is flight. (France)
- Don’t look where you fell, but where you slipped. (Liberia)
- Many lose when they win, and others win when they lose. (Germany)
And “It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.” (China)
Encore
When Polish composer André Tchaikowsky died in 1982, he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company in hopes that he might appear as Yorick in a production of Hamlet.
No one felt comfortable fulfilling this wish until David Tennant used the skull in a performance in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008. He continued to use it throughout the production’s West End run and in a later television adaptation.
“André’s skull was a profound memento mori, which perhaps no prop skull could quite provide,” said director Gregory Doran. “I hope other productions may, with the greatest respect for André, use the skull as he intended it to be used, for precisely this purpose.”
(Thanks, Pål.)
An old Danish jester named Yorick
Drank a gallon of pure paregoric;
“My jokes have been dull,”
He said, “but my skull
Will one of these days be historic.”
— Ogden Nash
Memorable Dedications
By Franklin Pierce Adams, in Overset, 1922:
To
Herbert Bayard Swope
without whose friendly
aid and counsel every
line in this book was
written.
By E. Greenly, in The Earth, Its Nature and History, 1927:
To the memory of
my wife Annie
the last act of whose life was to
re-read critically the manuscript
of this book.
By Francis Hackett, in The Invisible Censor, 1921:
To
my wife
Signe Toksvig
whose lack of interest
in this book has been my
constant desperation.
By Benjamin Disraeli, in Vivian Grey, 1826:
To
The Best and Greatest of Men
I dedicate these volumes.
He for whom it was intended will accept and
appreciate the compliment;
Those for whom it was not intended will —
do the same.
By John Burroughs, in Bird and Bough, 1906:
To
the kinglet
that sang in my evergreens in October and
made me think it was May.
By Jerome K. Jerome, in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1886:
To the very dear and well beloved Friend of my prosperous and evil days. — To the friend, who, though in the early stages of our acquaintanceship, he did ofttimes disagree with me, has since come to be my very warmest comrade. To the friend who, however often I may put him out, never (now) upsets me in revenge. To the friend who, treated with marked coldness by all the female members of my household, and regarded with suspicion by my very dog, nevertheless, seems day by day to be more drawn by me, and in return, to more and more impregnate me with the odour of his friendship. To the friend who never tells me of my faults, never wants to borrow money, and never talks about himself. To the companion of my idle hours, the soother of my sorrows, the confidant of my joys and hopes, my oldest and strongest Pipe, this little volume is gratefully and affectionately dedicated.
Authorial Distaste
- Kingsley Amis on Dylan Thomas, 1947: “I have got to the stage now with mr toss that I have only reached with Chaucer and Dryden, not even with Milton, that of VIOLENTLY WISHING that the man WERE IN FRONT OF ME, so that I could be DEMONIACALLY RUDE to him about his GONORRHEIC RUBBISH, and end up by WALKING ON HIS FACE and PUNCHING HIS PRIVY PARTS.”
- Mark Twain on Jane Austen, 1898: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
- Byron on Keats, 1820: “No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the driveling idiotism of the Mankin.”
- Virginia Woolf on D.H. Lawrence, 1932: “English has one million words: why confine yourself to six?”
- Cyril Connolly on George Orwell, 1973: “He would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.”
In reviewing Tom Wolfe’s 742-page A Man in Full in the New York Review of Books in 1998, Norman Mailer wrote: “At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s all over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated.”
Presumption Rewarded
Sinclair Lewis received this letter from a lawyer in a Midwestern city:
Dear Lewis:
Have read a few of your works and would like to ask a few favors. Please send me a list of your stories, your autograph, picture, and a letter describing your life. How many children have you and their names.
Thanking you, I am
Yours very truly,
J.J. Jones, Esq.
He responded:
My Dear Jim:
There was only one thing about your nice letter that I didn’t like. It was so sort of formal. True, we have never met, and somehow I feel we aren’t likely to, but, isn’t this a democratic country? So let me call you Jim, and you call me Fatty, or any other friendly name.
Now Jim, I haven’t got a photograph of me here, but I’ll go right down to the junction and have one taken. I’m preparing a letter about my life, but it’s been a pretty long one and a bad one, and that will take me several weeks.
But in the meantime, Jim, I’m awfully interested in lawyers. Kindly send me your picture, picture of your home and office, a list of your assets and liabilities, average income per month, list of the books you have read since 1914, if any. Kindly inform me whether you have ever defended a bootlegger and why. Should be glad to have any other interesting personal information for use in a story. How do you get along with your wife? Kindly explain this in detail.
Thanking you in advance, I remain,
Yours affectionately,
Sinclair Lewis
The Northanger Horrid Novels
In Northanger Abbey, Isabella Thorpe recommends seven Gothic novels to Catherine Morland:
‘Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.’
‘Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?’
‘I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.’
‘Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?’
‘Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.’
For a century it was assumed that Jane Austen had invented these titles, but then Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir discovered they were actual novels. Here’s an excerpt from Horrid Mysteries, which is certainly well named:
‘Thank God, Countess,’ one of them began, ‘that you have been rescued from the cruel hands of that barbarian, and are now in the company of more humane beings!’
‘From what cruel hands?’ I replied, with astonishment.
‘From those of your pretended lover, the Marquis Carlos of G******.’
‘Be silent, vile reptile,’ I exclaimed, ‘and dare not to asperse the name of a man whom I adore!’
Ironically, Austen’s parody may have rescued these titles from an oblivion they otherwise deserved. Announcing his discovery in a 1927 article, Sadleir wrote, “So long as Jane Austen is read — which will be for at least as long as there are readers at all — [these novels] will survive as tiny stitches in the immense tapestry of English literature.”