DID YOU KNOW…

…that Walt Whitman began his career as a gag writer for Artemus Ward?

…that Herman Melville originally wrote the first sentence of Moby-Dick as “Call me what you like, but don’t call me late for dinner,” but his editor begged him to change it?

…that Emily Dickinson struggled all her life with a degenerative aural disease that caused her to be unable to hear rhyming sounds?

…that F. Scott Fitzgerald stopped publishing under his given name because he was tired of people asking whether he was the Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald who wrote that song about the rockets?

…that Mark Twain intended to recast his epic Huckleberry Finn in English heroic verse, but never got around to it?

…that William Dean Howells was considered quite a writer in his day?

…that the estate of Herman Melville has commissioned a sequel to Moby-Dick in which Ahab returns as a vengeful cyborg?