Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 41

... that Eugene O'Neill's (pictured) first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920, and that it is about two brothers who love the same woman?

... that a vanity press is a company which, while claiming to be a traditional publisher, prints books and charges writers a fee in return for publishing their books, with the intended market being the author him/herself rather than the general public?

... that Michener's The Drifters, Sutcliffe's Are You Experienced? and Garland's The Beach are novels about backpackers?

... that Biedermann und die Brandstifter is a play by Swiss writer Max Frisch, the author of the 1957 novel Homo Faber?

... that Yaakov Shabtai's Zichron Dvarim (זכרון דברים; English title: Past Continuous) about three friends in 1960s Tel Aviv was one of the first novels to be written in truly vernacular Hebrew?

... that Three Men in a Boat, first published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford, and that the book was originally intended to be a serious travel guide?

... that Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat quoted Horace's "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" immediately before his beheading on Tower Hill, London in 1747, and that during the First World War Wilfred Owen wrote a poem entitled "Dulce Et Decorum Est"?