What name did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle give to his famous detective before he came up with Sherlock Holmes?- Which poet was the first American to have indoor plumbing?
- Who is the world’s youngest published author?
- Where does the phrase “good night, sleep tight” come from?
- What percentage of all publications sold in Japan are comic books?
What was the occupation of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series of mysteries?
The man responsible for writing the famous Sherlock Holmes mysteries was actually an eye doctor. Because this occupation didn’t pay enough for him to make a decent living, he wrote in his spare time to supplement his income.
Which well-known children’s author was known for wearing outlandish hats to parties?
Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, loved to wear crazy hats. He reasoned if he had a hard time coming up with rhymes, he could put on one of his many “thinking caps” for inspiration.
Which 19th century author wrote entire books while standing?
Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland standing up, although in the 19th century it was common to write standing up at a writing desk, leaning on a high stool.
If you were to place all of the shelves in the New York Public Library side by side, how far would the span?
They would be eighty miles long.
How many times did Leo Tolstoy’s wife edit the cumbersome, handwritten manuscript for War and Peace?
His wife edited the thick manuscript seven times to make sure it was perfect.
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Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up on the top of his refrigerator. (Wolfe was big and refrigerators were small back in 1929. Wolfe’s would write furiously and toss loose papers into a box by the side of his fridge. Max Perkins would receive those boxes and assemble books out of them.
From Wikipedia:
The greatest professional challenge Perkins ever faced was posed by Thomas Wolfe, whose talent was matched only by his lack of artistic self-discipline. Unlike most writers, who are often blocked, words poured out of Wolfe. A blessing in some ways, this was a curse too, as Wolfe was greatly attached to each sentence he wrote. After a tremendous struggle, Perkins induced Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). His next, Of Time and the River (1935), was the result of a two-year battle during which Wolfe kept writing more and more pages in the face of an ultimately victorious effort by Perkins to hold the line on size. Grateful to Perkins at first for discovering him and helping him realize his potential, Wolfe later came to resent the popular perception that he owed his success to his editor. Wolfe left Scribner's after numerous fights with Perkins. Despite this, Perkins served as Wolfe's literary executor after his early death in 1938.
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