The Tale of Genji is the world’s first novel, thought to have been written by Murasaki Shikibu in 1007.
-The words amazement, bedroom, advertising, blanket, bump, gloomy, puking, drugged, champion, accused and addiction were first used by William Shakespeare.
-Robinson Crusoe is the first novel written in English by Daniel Defoe.
-Dorothy Straight is considered the youngest writer in the world, as she was four years old when she wrote How the World Began.
-In Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the size and rotational speed of the Martian moons were described by astronomers more than a hundred years before.
-The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain was the first book written on a typewriter in 1876.
-John Steinbeck’s dog ate the original draft of the world-famous novel Of Mice and Men.
-Alexandre Dumas worked with a ghostwriter while writing his historical adventure novel The Three Musketeers.
-Margaret and H.A. Rey took the manuscript of The Curious Monkey with them when they fled Nazi-occupied Paris on a self-made bicycle.
-Alice in Wonderland, written by Linda Woolverton, is banned in China because of the talking animals in the book.
-The words wicked, cool, daiquiri and T-shirt were first used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel This Side of Paradise, published in 1920.
-Gabriel García Márquez refused to allow his cult novel One Hundred Years of Solitude to be adapted as a movie.
-Barbara Cartland published about 700 books in her lifetime. It is also rumored that the author finished a novel in two weeks.
-The Bay Psalm Book is the first book written in America.
