What are some interesting literature-related facts that you know?

[Anonymous No.21412508]

Hey there, /lit/. I wanted to make a post about facts from the literary world that I've discovered and hoping you can share some of your own discoveries. Biographical curiosities, little trivia, oddities, etc. All related to books, writers, poets, literary movements and all that. Here are some that I know:
>Roberto Bolaño's novella By Night in Chile (2000) was originally going to be titled Shit Storms ("Tormentas de mierda") but fellow writer Juan Villoro convinced Bolaño otherwise.
>Ismail Kadare's novel, The Palace of Dreams (1981), about an authoritarian regime that steals people's dreams and dissects them looking for information that may help the sultan, was denounced by the writers union in Kadare's native communist Albania just two weeks after publication but by that time the book was already sold out.
>Vladimir Nabokov self-admitted a prejudice against women writers, particularly saying he disliked Jane Austen's work. That is, until he read Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) and liked it so much he decided to teach it in his literature course.
>Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece "War and Peace" was originally titled "War, what is it good for?"
>Eino Friberg was a Finnish-born American translator. He lost his eyesight when he was 10 (an accident regarding a glass bottle of soda). He loved The Kalevala so much that he decided to translate it into English at age 75. It took him 13 years to do so but when it came out it was so acclaimed that Friberg received Finland's highest literary honor (Order of the White Rose).
>When he was a young man, Victor Hugo admired Chateaubriand so much that in one of his notes he wrote "I will be Chateaubriand or nothing."
>Ernst Jünger used to experiment with LSD alongside its very creator, Albert Hofmann.

[Anonymous No.21412521]

James Joyce was an antisemite with a scat fetish.

>To NORA
>Dublin 20 December 1909
>My sweet naughty girl I got your hot letter tonight and have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit? It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck half-way out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shite ready to fall put your arms round my neck in shame and shit it down softly. The sound will madden me and when I pull up your dress

>No use continuing! You can guess why!

[Anonymous No.21412528]

>>21412521
where's the antisemite part? I mean have you read ulysses, anon?

[Anonymous No.21412543]

>>21412508
Wtf I made this exact thread last month.
>>/lit/thread/S21234664

[Anonymous No.21412550]

>>21412528
Just go with it. It‘ll be accepted in 40 years that this was true because he had repressed poopy farty sex love since nobody could hate jews for a rational cause.

[Anonymous No.21412558]

>>21412543
>this exact thread
Not quite, there is something added

[Anonymous No.21412563]

>>21412558
Seinfeld reference :)

[Anonymous No.21412605]

>>21412550
>nobody could hate jews for a rational cause
Ahh yes I forgot 109 countries all collectively went insane.

[Anonymous No.21412891]

>>21412605
hilarious argument

[Anonymouṡ No.21413040]

>>21412508
SIX AUTHORS' LAST WORDS BEFORE SUICIDE


1.
And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead.

Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort (He shot himself, but only succeeded in blowing off his jaw. He was taken to prison and died shortly thereafter.)


2.
Dearest, I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems to be the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier until this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness in my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling you life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Virginia Woolf (Note left before drowning herself in the River Ouse, 1941.)


3.
"Football Season is Over"
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always b*tchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won't hurt.

Hunter S. Thompson (Note for his wife, written a few days before he shot himself.)


4.
All fled — all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over, and the lamps expire.

Robert E. Howard (He shot himself after his mother died. The couplet is slightly misquoting The House of Caesar by Viola Garvin.)


5.
Goodbye, everybody!

Hart Crane (Last words before jumping overboard from a ship.)


6.
I don't think they even heard me.

Yukio Mishima (He shouted "Long live His imperial Majesty!" on the balcony, went inside, said the above, and disembowelled himself.)

[Anonymouṡ No.21413105]

>>21412508

SIX HILARIOUSLY BAD WORKING TITLES FOR FAMOUS WORKS OF LITERATURE


— The Waste Land
'He Do The Police In Different Voices' [Without a doubt the worst working title ever. It's a reference to 'Our Mutual Friend', where someone reads out newspaper crime reports doing different voices.]


— The Great Gatsby
'Trimalchio in West Egg' [Fitzgerald was advised that most prospective readers wouldn't know who Trimalchio was.]


— Catch-22
'Catch-18' & 'Catch-11' [Heller originally wanted 18, but this clashed with the recently-publishedwar novel 'Mila 18'. So he changed it to 11, but this clashed with the release of the movie 'Ocean's Eleven', so he just doubled it. The rhythm of '22' is so much better I'm amazed he didn't get it right first time.]


— Mein Kampf
'Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice' [The publisher went for something snappier.]


— Lolita
'The Kingdom by the Sea' [A reference to Poe's poem 'Annabel Lee'. There's still a bit of her in the name Lo Lee Ta.]


— Atlas Shrugged
'The Strike' [The book took twelve years to write. Rand changed the title one year before publication, at her husband's suggestion. Maybe the original title wasn't terrible, but it's a bit misleading.]

[Anonymous No.21413607]

>>21412508
Melville wrote Moby-Dick as a comedy and then read and met Nathaniel Hawthorne, revised it as a tragedy and dedicated the book to him "in admiration of his genius"

[Anonymous No.21413626]

>>21413040
kek Mishima, didn't remember that one. A bit unfair maybe since he did write a death haiku.

[Anonymous No.21413693]

>>21413607
What is worth reading from Melville besides Moby-Dick? (outside the three novellas which I've read already)
Is pre Moby-Dick Melville any good? I was eyeing Redburn and White-Jacket in particular.

[Anonymous No.21414113]

>>21413105
> 'Catch-18' & 'Catch-11' [Heller originally wanted 18, but this clashed with the recently-publishedwar novel 'Mila 18'. So he changed it to 11, but this clashed with the release of the movie 'Ocean's Eleven', so he just doubled it. The rhythm of '22' is so much better I'm amazed he didn't get it right first time.]
Robert Gottlieb, his editor, suggested the 22. There’s a documentary about Gottlieb and Caro (LBJ books writer) coming up.

[Anonymous No.21414179]

>>21413693
Billy Budd, Sailor
Bartleby The Scrivener (short story)
Typee
The Confidence Man

[Anonymous No.21414826]

>>21412605
>kick them out
>make them pay money to get back in
>kick them out again

[Anonymous No.21414834]

>>21412563
Television is for niggers

[Anonymous No.21414877]

>>21412508
Did you know that Bongholio poopity poop his pants while writing his erotic masterpizza and dedicated it to his long dead homo-sex kindergarten lover?

[Anonymous No.21414894]

>>21414834
Faulkner reference.

[Anonymous No.21414898]

>>21414894
Not a reference. Just a fact.

[Bookie !!S4Nzgj8dP3d No.21415001]

>>21412508
John Steinbeck exclusively wrote with pencils, and went through hundreds of pencils each year.

[Anonymous No.21415904]

>>21413105
Atlas shrugged has the title "the strike" in french . Havent read the book and i found it interesting when i contemplated pirating it in french