Posts Tagged Authors

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been.”

- Mary Anne Evans, English novelist (known better under her pen name: George Eliot)

John Tenniel's original illustrations of Tweedledee and Tweedledum from Carroll's 1871 "Through the Looking-Glass."

Definition: Two people or entities that are alike.

Origins: In 1725, poet John Byrom coined “tweedledum” and “tweedledee” when he used those terms to make fun of two quarreling composers (Handel and Bononcini). Byrom stated that both composers had similar music and because of this, one was “tweedledum” and the other “tweedledee.” The term later gained notoriety and popularity when Lewis Carroll used the term for two twin brothers in his 1872 successful novel Through the Looking-Glass.

Ammer, Christine. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997, 684.

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

- Mark Twain

Photo via pbs.org

Mary had a little lamb and Thomas Edison

“Mary had a little lamb,” is perhaps the most popular children’s song. In 1830, Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston wrote this popular rhyme after hearing a story of a lamb following its young owner to school. It was published in the fall edition of Juvenile Miscellany, a children’s journal that Hale was editor of.

On November 20, 1877, Thomas Edison recorded the first words of human speech into his phonograph. Those first words were “Mary had a little lamb.”

Panati, Charles. Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Harper & Row, 1987, 196.

[Photo]

Sinclair Lewis

In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his novel Arrowsmith, but he refused it because he did not agree with awards based on author competition. For Lewis, the Nobel Prize was different since it is based on an author’s entire body of work instead of individual novels. Another reason Lewis did not accept the Pulitzer could be his bitterness from losing it twice before for Main Street (1921) and Babbitt (1923). He stated that he would have accepted the Pulitzer for either Main Street or Babbitt had either won.

[Information - The Sinclair Lewis Society]

[Photo - mnhs.org]

The first million-dollar American novelist was Jack London (1876-1916). The first writer to become a billionaire was J.K. Rowling.

J.K. Rowling

[Photos - Jack London and J.K. Rowling]