Originals A Z Fiction

by William Amos

Arranged alphabetically by name of the fictional character, this book reveals anecdotes and gossip about the lives of the real people behind many characters in fiction. It includes the woman Agatha Christie used as a model for Miss Marple and the men Fleming used to create his character "M".

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Annabelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gossip, scandals, and historical and literary trivia abound, all told in a conversational tone, sometimes too casual and free flowing I had to analyze it like an algebra problem, taking note of parenthesized phrases, semi-colons, the frequent em dashes. But let's face it. I got this so I could gloat about the many books I could tick off, had in fact a pencil for a bookmark.* How very humbling to realize just how little I've read--barely a handful of novels by Dickens, Hemingway, and Henry James, just one each of George Eliot's (Middlemarch, which I loved) and Evelyn Waugh's (Brideshead Revisited, which I found taxing), and Ford Madox Ford's (the dull The Good Soldier), and none of D.H. Lawrence's nor George Bernard Shaw's--prolific writers, all. Moreover, there are a lot more writers I have only heard of now, and which William Amos seems to have dedicated much of his time to researching, or perhaps they were more inclined to do composites of their characters: extremely productive were Christopher Isherwood, Wyndham Lewis, to name two. Then again, this compendium only skimmed the works of the equally fertile minds of Edith Wharton (among her novels, and I've read them all--only The Age of Innocence is discussed), Jane Austen, and Tennessee Williams. Well-represented were the works of two of my favorite writers, especially when it comes to short stories: Somerset Maugham and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Some of the most frequently mentioned works, owing to their number of characters drawn from confirmed and suspected composites, which I've read:

- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Great Gatsby/Tender is the Night/This Side of Paradise/The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Aspern Papers by Henry James
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- The Magician/The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham (that both stories were based on Aleister Crowley and Charles Gauguin, respectively, I'd guessed early into reading each)
- Of Human Bondage/Cakes and Ale/The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham
- Anna Karenina/War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- King Solomon's Mines by H.R. Haggard
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- Villette by Charlotte Bronte
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
- Last Tales/Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

Some writers I had hoped to find here:

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- John Cheever
- Daphne du Maurier
- Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and Humbert Humbert would have made interesting research)
- Han Suyin
- H.P. Lovecraft
- Isaac Asimov
- Ray Bradbury

* I hardly ever defile a book by writing on it, even with a pencil. But posterity and my need to remember took precedence.