Today I thought I'd share some unusual facts about some winter authors. Here they are.
Edgar Alan Poe (born January 19, 1809):
- The father of Edgar Poe was a touring actor;
- He was raised in a foster home after his father left the family and his mother died of tuberculosis;
- Knew Latin and Greek and was unrivaled in poetry while still in school;
- Couldn't feel the left side of his face due to birth trauma;
- Addicted to mysticism because of a math teacher who taught lessons in a cemetery;
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Jack London (real name John Griffith) (born January 12, 1876):
- His father was an astrologer and his mother practiced spiritualism;
- John's John abandoned him before he was born, and his mother tried to shoot herself because of it;
- He spent his early childhood with a dark-skinned nanny, whom he remembered with great warmth throughout his life;
- His best friend and guardian angel was his half-sister Eliza;
- At age 21, during the gold rush, he went to Alaska, but brought back not gold, but plots for many of his works ("Son of the Wolf," "White Fang," "Call of the Ancestors," and "Time-is-not-waiting").
Redyard Kipling (born December 30, 1865):
- He spent his early childhood in India, with his Hindu nanny, from whom he learned many fairy tales;
- He could not become a military man because of poor eyesight, but at the age of 16 he received a gift from his parents - a book of his own poems;
- As a reporter traveled around India and some neighboring countries, and thanks to this his writing career went uphill - by the age of 24 six books were published;
- In 1907, he became the first Englishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature;
- After the death of his son (who was missing), he helped in the search for missing British soldiers.
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Lewis Carroll ( real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) ( born January 27, 1832):
- He was left-handed, but they tried to retrain him, which led to stuttering;
- He loved photography;
- He loved and knew how to play chess, and even taught children the game of chess;
- He was a bachelor;
- When he met Alice in Wonderland, Queen Victoria asked for the rest of Lewis Carroll's books, but they turned out to be... mathematical treatises.
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Jane Austen (born December 16, 1775):
- From a large family: she had six brothers and a sister, Jane was the penultimate child;
- One of Jane's brothers, George, never learned to speak, and for his sake Jane learned the mute alphabet;
- Austin was a great fashionista and loved to party : her letters were full of descriptions of balls and dresses;
- Friended her brother Henry's wife, Elise, to whom she owed her love of the theater and her knowledge of French;
- She never married; rumor has it that this was because Jane was faithful to someone, but who it was (and whether it was at all) was known only to her and her sister Cassandra.
Alan Alexander Milne ( born January 18, 1882):
- At school he was a pupil of Herbert Wells and was friends with James Barrie;
- First text published when he was 8 years and 9 months old. It was a report from a soccer match;
- The first royalty received for parodying stories about Sherlock Holmes - these stories were published in the humor magazine "Punch";
- The toy bear from the stories about Winnie-the-Pooh existed in reality, and its owner was Alan Milne's son Christopher Robin, but at first this bear was called ... Edward. He got his name when his master met a Winnipeg bear;
- January 18 is Winnie the Pooh Day in Britain.
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These are the facts. Which ones did you know? Which ones did you find most interesting?