On June 4, 1940, Houghton Mifflin published the first novel by the American writer Carson McCullers, a sensitive story about misfits and social outcasts in a Southern mill town titled…
Category: Literature
“Live fast, die young and have [or leave] a good-looking corpse!”
The saying “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse!” is often associated with actor James Dean. Dean didn’t say it as a line in any of his own…
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., often referred to as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, is one of the most famous biographies ever written and the best known source…
“Coffee, Tea or Me?” – the catchphrase popularized by a hoax based on a joke…
Back in the 1960s, when air travel was more pleasant and our culture was less politically correct, airline stewardesses were hot – at least in terms of their popular image.…
“He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”
In the 1630s, England’s infamous “Star Chamber” (sort of a politically-oriented version of the Spanish Inquisition) banned the printing or sale of “any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets.”…
“Never play cards with a man called Doc” — and other advice from Nelson Algren…
The copyright record for the novel A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren says it was copyrighted on May 18, 1956. Traditionally, the copyright date is also a…
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
The great American poet Robert Frost died in 1963, when he was 88 years old. But he wrote his epitaph more than two decades before that, in a poem titled…