Mr. Mallarmé’s occupation was an English teacher

Douglas Adams (11 March, 1952 – 11 May, 2001) was an English humorist and dramatist best known for his series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3154283 1) Mr. Adams had some interesting jobs throughout his life. He was a a bodyguard to oil tycoons from Qatar and cleaning chicken sheds at one point. 2) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started as a radio show. The idea occurred to Mr. Adams while he lay drunk in a field in Austria looking at the stars. 3) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a trilogy… of five books. 4) Mr. Adams was never a prolific writer and constantly missed deadlines. He had to be forced by others to do any writing. Mr. Adams was known for saying: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” 5) Mr. Adams also wrote three episodes of the TV series Dr. Who. 6) Not only did Douglas Adams wrote for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, he also appeared in two episodes. 7) Pink Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell, was named by Mr. Adams. 8) Mr. Adams was the first person in the…

Victor Hugo was a French author best known for his novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. He was also a human rights activist

His 1924 novel The Vortex (La vorágine), about the rubber workers in the Amazon basin, is considered a most important novel in Latin American literary history.

Darwin loved animals…. He started a club in college which dined on “birds and beasts, which were before unknown to human palate”. While traveling around the globe, he continued to eat exotic animals.

William S. Burroughs (5 February, 1914 – 2 August, 1997) was an American author, satirist, painter and celebrity. Image from http://www.burroughs100.com/features/the-burroughs-guy-an-interview-with-james-grauerholz-by-tom-king-text-and-audio Burroughs family fortune came from the Burroughs Adding Machine. His parents sold their stock in 1929, right before the crush. Burroughs has a degree in English lit from Harvard. The military rejected him four times. When he was in Vienna to study medicine, he married Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman, so that she could get a visa and not be sent to a concentration camp. Even though they divorced, they remained close friends. Burroughs first tried opium with his family’s housekeeper. U2 were big fans and wanted Burroughs to be in one of their videos He is on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Kurt Cobain was also a fan, the author thought Cobain was strange and that “There’s something wrong with that boy”. Mr. Burroughs didn’t know who Cobain was or who Nirvana were. One of his first jobs was to interview Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. Mr. Burroughs went to their concert but hated the music, so he and Page talked about magic. You can read ABOUT the interview here, it’s actually…

Anton Chekhov (29 January, 1860 – 15 July, 1904) was one of Russia’s most beloved writers. He wrote plays, short stories, novellas, non-fiction, and one novel. “Chekhov 1898 by Osip Braz” by Osip Braz – [1]. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. Chekhov was a physician by trade with a degree from I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. Checkhov’s nom de plume was Island of Antosha Chekhonte Unlike many other authors, Mr. Chekhov lived on money he earned from writing and treated many of his patients for free. In 1887 Mr. Chekhov won the Pushkin Prize for his short story collection At Dusk. Chekhov published Island of Sakhalin in 1893 – 94 as a social piece on prison reform. Chekhov’s short story The Lady with the Dog is considered one of the best, if not the best, short story ever written. A few months before he died, Chekhov told Ivan Bunin, another writer, that he thought people might go on reading his writings for seven years. “Why seven?” “Well, seven and a half. That’s not bad. I’ve got six years to live.” According to IMDB, only Shakespeare outranks Chekhov with the amount of movies adaptations. Chekhov married Olga Knipper,…

It seems that Molière enjoyed antagonizing people even those from his inner, aristocratic circle making fun of infidelity and such.

Wilkie Collins (8 January, 1824 – 23 September, 1889) was a popular English author best known for The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Mr. Collins is credited with writing novels full of intrigue and mystery, forerunners to today’s popular detective novels.

Green Lantern’s oath (“In the brightest day, in darkest night”) is credited to Mr. Bester.