Did you know: five fun facts about literary classics

With the key themes and plotlines of more than 80 classics explored, including Pride and Prejudice, The Catcher in the Rye and 1984, Great Novels explores the finest novels from around the world and through time. Enjoy these fun facts about some of the greatest written masterpieces.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck wrote the manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath in a 100-day frenzy of creativity during the summer of 1938. Despite the furious speed at which it was written, Steinbeck’s text, is extremely neat, with few corrections or rewrites. Steinbeck’s notes to himself are scattered throughout. Towards the end, his writing becomes progressively smaller and lacks punctuation, reflecting the urgency of his need to conclude the work.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice was published, in three volumes, on 28 January 1813 for 18 shillings. All 1,500 copies sold, and a second edition was called for later the same year. Austen had sold the copyright to the publisher, Thomas Egerton, for a one-off payment of £110 and made no further profit. Egerton made four times as much money from the novel as Austen.

1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published by Secker & Warburg, in the UK, 35 years before the date mentioned in its title. The book’s original title was The Last Man in Europe, but both Orwell and his editor, Frederic Warburg, agreed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was catchier.

Moby Dick

Moby-Dick is a remarkable feat of literary imagination, but it was also inspired by several real-life cases of vengeful whales. One legendary whale, an albino sperm whale named Mocha Dick, developed a reputation for attacking ships off the coast of Chile, and in 1839 became the subject of an article by J.N. Reynolds entitled “Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal”. Melville read the article, which appeared in the New York monthly magazine The Knickerbocker. He also drew on a book called Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821), by Owen Chase, which described the sinking of a whaling ship by an irate sperm whale off the coast of South America.

The Age of Innocence

The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel was established in 1917, and quickly became one of the most prestigious literary awards. The prize, one of several honouring achievements in the arts, was funded from the will of American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and was to be awarded annually to an outstanding novel. Pulitzer’s will stipulated that the prize should be awarded to the book that best presented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life”. As many of Wharton’s characters question and break social taboos, this stipulation seemed to exclude her from ever winning the prize. However, the committee that set it up changed the text of the conditions from “wholesome atmosphere” to “whole atmosphere”. The Age of Innocence impressed the judges, and the book won the prize in 1921. Edith Wharton was the first woman novelist to win a Pulitzer.