Don't Know Much About Literature part 2

There were some very interesting facts I learned while reading this book. I have to share some of them, because I feel everyone should have the same useless information that is actually fascinating.

1. The Education of Little Tree was a book I always knew was a fake, written by someone claiming to have Cherokee heritage. What I never knew was that it was actually written by Asa Earl Carter, an organizer of the Ku Klux Klan. That fact just blew me away.

2. Dill Harris, Scout Finch's friend and neighbor in the book To Kill A Mockingbird (one of my favorites) was based on Harper Lee's friend Truman Capote. I never knew they were friends.

3. Ulysses by James Joyce and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman were considered to be obscene novels. In fact Whitman was fired from his job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs after the Secretary of the Interior read a working copy. I find it strange that both were labled as obscene, and I never knew Whitman was working for the BIA.

4. Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammie in the movie version Gone With The Wind. She was not able to attend the premier of the movie because the theater was segregated.

5. Tim O'Brien, who authored The Things They Carried, a fantastic book about the Vietnam War, served as an infantry foot soldier in the American division that was involved in the My Lai massacre in 1968.

6. The following authors never won a Nobel Prize:

James Joyce

Franz Kafka

Gertrude Stein

Kurt Vonnegut

Willa Cather

Virginia Woolf

7. William Faulkner could not support himself with his novels, so he became a Hollywood screenwriter. He adapted To Have and Have Not by Hemmingway and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler for the big screen.

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited for coining the phrase "The Jazz Age".

9. The Night Before Christmas was originally published anonymously as a poem in a newspaper. Many believe that Clement C. Moore had written it, but others claim it was actually Major Henry Livingston Jr., poet, who wrote the work. Moore claimed the work after Livingston's death, and many who read other works by Moore say the authors other poems are less playful and he could not have written it.

10. John Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost. He would dictate to his daughters who would then write them down.