Literary Fact of the Day Round Up: Oct 28-November 12, 2010

In case you don't use Twitter or for some inexcusable reason have missed a LFOTD from the last couple of weeks, here's a recap:

• At age 26, Edgar Allan Poe married his 13 year old cousin, Virginia Clemm. 
• Robert Lowell was a conscientous objector during World War II and spend several months in Danbury's minimum security prison.
• Edna St Vincent Millay got her middle name from the NYC hospital where her uncle's life was saved just before her birth.
• The creator of Lifesavers candy was the father of the poet Hart Crane, who drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. (Can't make this stuff up)
• Wallace Stevens' father disapproved of his son's marriage, and after the engagement announcement they never spoke to each other again
•  In 1912, William Carlos Williams married Florence Herman, but only after her older sister rejected his proposal.
• Joyce Carol Oates was Foer's advisor @ Princeton & oversaw his senior thesis, which would eventually become EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED.
• Annie Proulx and her four sisters had not been all in the same room for more than 40 years until their father's funeral.
• During the Nazi occupation of Italy, Italo Calvino went into hiding to avoid conscription & the Nazis put his parents in detention.
• Ralph Ellison wrote over 2000 pages for his second novel, worked on it for more than 30 years, and never finished it.
• If Dostoyevsky had not submitted CRIME & PUNISHMENT to his publisher on-time, he would have lost his rights to all past & future work.
• In 1824, Lafayette returned to an adoring US. During his parade in NY, he embraced a boy in the crowd. It was 5 year old Walt Whitman.
• Princeton has conferred multiple honorary degrees on only one person: Booth Tarkington.
• Only three writers have multiple Pulitzer Prizes for fiction: Updike, Faulker, and Booth Tarkington.
• Acutely aware of his condition & ever the wit, Oscar Wilde's last words were "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." Wallpaper stayed.