Literary Facts

Literary Fact of the Day :root { –bg: #f6efe2; –card: #fffaf0; –ink: #2a2118; –muted: #7a6a58; –accent: #8c2f1e; –rule: #e3d5bd; } :root[data-theme=”dark”] { –bg: #17130f; –card: #221c16; –ink: #f1e8d8; –muted: #b3a38c; –accent: #e08a6a; –rule: #3a3026; } * { box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0; padding: 0; } html, body { height: 100%; } body { background: var(–bg); color: var(–ink); font-family: “Fraunces”, Georgia, “Times New Roman”, serif; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; padding: 4vmin; overflow: hidden; } .card { width: 100%; height: 100%; background: var(–card); border: 1px solid var(–rule); border-radius: 2.5vmin; padding: 5vmin 6vmin; display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 3vmin; } header { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; align-items: baseline; gap: 2vmin; border-bottom: 1px solid var(–rule); padding-bottom: 2.5vmin; font-family: “Inter”, system-ui, sans-serif; } .label { font-weight: 600; letter-spacing: 0.12em; text-transform: uppercase; color: var(–accent); font-size: clamp(10px, 3.4vmin, 28px); } .date { color: var(–muted); font-weight: 500; font-size: clamp(10px, 3vmin, 24px); white-space: nowrap; } main { flex: 1; display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; gap: 2.5vmin; min-height: 0; } .tag { align-self: flex-start; font-family: “Inter”, system-ui, sans-serif; font-weight: 600; font-size: clamp(9px, 2.8vmin, 20px); color: var(–muted); border: 1px solid var(–rule); border-radius: 999px; padding: 0.5vmin 2vmin; } .fact { font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.3; font-size: clamp(14px, 6.2vmin, 64px); text-wrap: pretty; } .fact.long { font-size: clamp(13px, 5.2vmin, 54px); } // ?theme=dark in the URL switches to the dark look try { if (new URLSearchParams(location.search).get(“theme”) === “dark”) { document.documentElement.setAttribute(“data-theme”, “dark”); } } catch (e) {} const FACTS = [ [“Behind the Book”, “Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at 18, during a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley at a villa near Lake Geneva in 1816.”], [“Behind the Book”, “1816 was called \”the Year Without a Summer\” — a massive volcanic eruption the year before cooled the planet, and the gloomy weather kept Mary Shelley’s circle indoors telling ghost stories.”], [“Titles”, “Frankenstein’s full title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus — a nod to the Greek Titan punished for giving fire to humanity.”], [“Genre”, “The first Gothic novel is usually said to be Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which he first passed off as a translation of an ancient Italian manuscript.”], [“Word Origins”, “Horace Walpole, the Gothic novelist, also coined the word \”serendipity\” in 1754.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel: it’s told entirely through letters, diary entries, telegrams, and newspaper clippings.”], [“Shakespeare”, “Shakespeare’s works contain the earliest recorded written uses of many English words, including \”bedroom\” and \”swagger.\””], [“Shakespeare”, “Without the First Folio, compiled by two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors in 1623, about 18 of his plays — including Macbeth and The Tempest — might have been lost forever.”], [“Shakespeare”, “In 1613, a cannon fired as a special effect during Henry VIII set the Globe Theatre’s thatched roof on fire. The theater burned to the ground.”], [“Shakespeare”, “In Shakespeare’s day, women were not allowed on the English stage. Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Ophelia were all played by teenage boys.”], [“Shakespeare”, “Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play. Performed uncut, it can run around four hours.”], [“Coincidence”, “Shakespeare and Cervantes both have a recorded death date of April 23, 1616 — but England and Spain used different calendars, so they actually died about ten days apart.”], [“Titles”, “Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury takes its title from Macbeth’s speech that calls life \”a tale told by an idiot.\””], [“Titles”, “Aldous Huxley borrowed \”Brave New World\” from a line spoken by Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”], [“Titles”, “Chinua Achebe took the title Things Fall Apart from W. B. Yeats’s poem \”The Second Coming.\””], [“Titles”, “Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men comes from Robert Burns’s poem \”To a Mouse,\” about how the best-laid plans often go wrong.”], [“Titles”, “Catch-22 was originally going to be Catch-18. The number changed to avoid confusion with another novel, Leon Uris’s Mila 18.”], [“Titles”, “F. Scott Fitzgerald considered calling The Great Gatsby \”Trimalchio in West Egg\” — after a showy party host in an ancient Roman satire.”], [“Titles”, “Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun gets its title from Langston Hughes’s poem \”Harlem,\” which asks what happens to a dream deferred.”], [“Behind the Book”, “The Great Gatsby sold poorly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. During World War II, about 155,000 free copies were printed for American soldiers, which helped make it a classic.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Steinbeck’s setter puppy chewed up about half of his first draft of Of Mice and Men. He had to rewrite it.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 on a coin-operated typewriter in a UCLA library basement, paying ten cents per half hour. The total cost: $9.80.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Bradbury titled Fahrenheit 451 after the temperature he was told paper catches fire.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Jack Kerouac typed On the Road on a single continuous scroll of paper about 120 feet long so he wouldn’t have to stop to change pages.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Dostoevsky dictated The Gambler to a young stenographer in just 26 days to beat a contract deadline. The next year, he married her.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in about six weeks and paid for its publication himself.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Most of Dickens’s novels were first published in weekly or monthly installments, so readers experienced them like TV seasons — with cliffhangers.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Hemingway said he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times before he got the words right.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Moby-Dick was first published in London under the title The Whale, and it was a commercial failure. Melville died largely forgotten.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to his friend and neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in about seven weeks while doing anthropological research in Haiti.”], [“Behind the Book”, “In 1956, friends gave Harper Lee a Christmas gift: enough money to quit her job for a year and write. That year became To Kill a Mockingbird.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, sheltering in an underground meat locker — the experience behind Slaughterhouse-Five.”], [“Behind the Book”, “George Orwell wrote much of 1984 on Jura, a remote Scottish island, while seriously ill.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for the 1950s anti-Communist \”witch hunts.\” A few years later, Miller himself was called before Congress to testify.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893. Readers were so upset that he eventually brought the detective back.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Sherlock Holmes was partly inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, one of Conan Doyle’s medical professors, who could deduce a patient’s life from tiny details.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 different words — on a bet from his publisher.”], [“Behind the Book”, “William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was rejected by many publishers before Faber & Faber finally accepted it.”], [“Behind the Book”, “John Milton was completely blind when he composed Paradise Lost. He dictated it line by line to helpers.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Brod refused, and published The Trial and The Castle instead.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Chaucer planned for each pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales to tell several stories. He finished only 24 tales before he died.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Beowulf survives in only one manuscript, which was scorched in a 1731 library fire. Some of its edges crumbled away.”], [“Behind the Book”, “The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed to be performed aloud. Repeated phrases like \”rosy-fingered Dawn\” helped singers remember thousands of lines.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Thoreau lived at Walden Pond for two years, two months, and two days.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and kept revising and expanding it for the rest of his life.”], [“Behind the Book”, “Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in his local Tuscan dialect instead of Latin, which helped make Tuscan the basis of modern Italian.”], [“Pen Names”, “\”Mark Twain\” was a riverboat call meaning the water is two fathoms (12 feet) deep — safe to pass. His real name was Samuel Clemens.”], [“Pen Names”, “Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë first published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — names that kept their initials but hid their gender.”], [“Pen Names”, “George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, was Mary Ann Evans. She used a man’s name so her work would be taken seriously.”], [“Pen Names”, “Jane Austen never put her name on her novels. Sense and Sensibility was credited simply to \”A Lady.\””], [“Pen Names”, “Lewis Carroll was Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford.”], [“Pen Names”, “George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair.”], [“Pen Names”, “Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams.”], [“Pen Names”, “Before Little Women, Louisa May Alcott wrote sensational thrillers under the name A. M. Barnard.”], [“Pen Names”, “Nathaniel Hawthorne added the \”w\” to his last name. One theory: to distance himself from his ancestor John Hathorne, a judge at the Salem witch trials.”], [“Coincidence”, “Mark Twain was born in 1835, when Halley’s Comet appeared. He predicted he’d go out with it — and died in 1910, the day after the comet’s next closest approach to the sun.”], [“Mystery”, “Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious on a Baltimore street in 1849 and died days later. To this day, no one knows exactly what killed him.”], [“Firsts”, “Edgar Allan Poe is credited with inventing the modern detective story with \”The Murders in the Rue Morgue\” (1841).”], [“Firsts”, “\”The Raven\” made Edgar Allan Poe famous almost overnight when it was published in 1845.”], [“Firsts”, “Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.”], [“Firsts”, “A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway.”], [“Firsts”, “In 2016, Bob Dylan became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.”], [“Firsts”, “In 2021, Amanda Gorman became the youngest poet to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration. She was 22.”], [“Poetry”, “Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems, but only about ten were published in her lifetime — and usually edited without her permission.”], [“Poetry”, “At John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, sun glare kept Robert Frost from reading his new poem. He recited \”The Gift Outright\” from memory instead.”], [“Poetry”, “Robert Frost partly wrote \”The Road Not Taken\” to tease his friend Edward Thomas, who always regretted whichever path they didn’t take on their walks.”], [“Poetry”, “Iambic pentameter is ten syllables in an unstressed-STRESSED pattern: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM.”], [“Poetry”, “A sonnet is 14 lines. Petrarchan sonnets split into 8 + 6 lines; Shakespearean sonnets use three quatrains and a final couplet.”], [“Poetry”, “Traditional Japanese haiku count sound units called \”on,\” not English syllables — so 5-7-5 is an approximation in English.”], [“Poetry”, “Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, invented \”sprung rhythm.\” His poems weren’t published until 1918, nearly 30 years after his death.”], [“Poetry”, “T. S. Eliot worked as a banker at Lloyds Bank in London while writing The Waste Land.”], [“Poetry”, “Maya Angelou read \”On the Pulse of Morning\” at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration.”], [“Word Origins”, “The word \”robot\” comes from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. It was based on a Czech word for forced labor.”], [“Word Origins”, “Thomas More coined \”utopia\” in 1516. It’s a Greek pun: it can mean both \”no place\” and \”good place.\””], [“Word Origins”, “Noah Webster changed British spellings like \”colour\” and \”centre\” to \”color\” and \”center\” — partly to give America its own identity.”], [“Word Origins”, “Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language took him about nine years to complete.”], [“Word Origins”, “The first full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary took about 70 years to finish. One of its most prolific volunteer contributors sent in his work from an asylum.”], [“Word Origins”, “Gertrude Stein’s phrase \”a lost generation\” became the name for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the writers who came of age during World War I.”], [“Genre”, “Hemingway’s \”iceberg theory\”: show only the tip of a story and let the deeper meaning stay beneath the surface.”], [“Genre”, “Jonathan Swift’s \”A Modest Proposal\” (1729) suggested the poor sell their children as food. It’s satire — one of the most famous examples ever written.”], [“Myth-Buster”, “There’s no solid evidence Hemingway wrote the six-word story \”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.\” The attribution appeared decades after his death.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks on her family farm in Georgia — dozens of them.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis met regularly at Oxford with a writing group called the Inklings, reading drafts aloud to each other.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “G. K. Chesterton created Father Brown, a humble Catholic priest who solves crimes by understanding human sin.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Dostoevsky was sentenced to death in 1849 and stood before a firing squad — then was spared at the last moment.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the U.S.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1973, Alice Walker found it and placed a headstone.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Emily Brontë wrote only one novel: Wuthering Heights. She died the year after it was published.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Oscar Wilde wrote only one novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Washington Irving promoted his first book with a hoax: newspaper ads about a missing old historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker.”], [“Writers’ Lives”, “Anne Frank received her diary as a gift for her 13th birthday.”], [“Records”, “Guinness World Records lists Agatha Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time.”], [“Records”, “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953 — the only novel he published in his lifetime.”], [“Records”, “Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949.”], [“History”, “The Gutenberg Bible, printed around 1455, was the first major book printed in Europe with movable metal type.”] ]; // Seeded shuffle so consecutive days don’t feel related, and every class sees the same fact all day. function mulberry32(a) { return function () { a |= 0; a = (a + 0x6D2B79F5) | 0; let t = Math.imul(a ^ (a >>> 15), 1 | a); t = (t + Math.imul(t ^ (t >>> 7), 61 | t)) ^ t; return ((t ^ (t >>> 14)) >>> 0) / 4294967296; }; } const order = FACTS.map((_, i) => i); const rand = mulberry32(20261026); for (let i = order.length – 1; i > 0; i–) { const j = Math.floor(rand() * (i + 1)); [order[i], order[j]] = [order[j], order[i]]; } let shownDay = null; function render() { const now = new Date(); const day = Math.floor(Date.UTC(now.getFullYear(), now.getMonth(), now.getDate()) / 86400000); if (day === shownDay) return; shownDay = day; const [tag, text] = FACTS[order[day % FACTS.length]]; document.getElementById(“tag”).textContent = tag; const factEl = document.getElementById(“fact”); factEl.textContent = text; factEl.classList.toggle(“long”, text.length > 170); document.getElementById(“date”).textContent = now.toLocaleDateString(“en-US”, { weekday: “long”, month: “long”, day: “numeric” }); } render(); setInterval(render, 60000); // picks up the new fact if the screen stays open past midnight