Saturday Night Fever

The thing I learned today is that the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever was based on an article written by Nik Cohn called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," about young men haunting the disco club Odyssey.  In the 1990s, Cohn revealed his article was fabricated, as he could make no sense of the actual disco scene.

Tom Sawyer

The thing I learned today is that Tom Sawyer, the character, appears in no less than four novels by Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894); and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896).

Bangladeshi national anthem

Rabindranath Tagore wrote the words to the national anthems of both Bangladesh ("Amar Shonar Bangla") and India ("Jana Gana Mana").

The Bathtub Hoax was the result of a humor piece written in 1917 by H.L. Mencken. Titled "A Neglected Anniversary," it insinuated that Millard Fillmore popularized the bathtub by installing one in the White House.

Seba Smith

Seba Smith was an American humorist and writer who used vernacular in print.  His series of satirical letters by "Major Jack Downing" lampooned both sides of American politics in the early 1800s.  He also wrote "A Corpse Going To a Ball" in 1843, a ballad in which a young woman freezes to death because she refuses put a blanket over her party dress.  Her name was Charlotte, and this inspired the FRozen Charlotte dolls' name.

Maya Angelou was born with the name Marguerite Johnson. The name "Maya" was derived from her brother's nickname for her, apparently from "my-a sister" (or from "Mayan," for some reason?). Also, she worked as a prostitute in her teen years and got the name "Angelou" when she wanted something exotic for her work as a nightclub singer and dancer.

Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler was a writer and futurist, best known for his works Future Shock and The Third Wave. He predicted how technology will shape how people feel and interact in a post-industrial society.

Erewhon

Samuel Butler was a 19th-century British writer most famous for his satire of utopian ideals and Victorian mores, "Erewhon."

St. Lucia Nobel Prize winners

St. Lucia, the tiny island nation in the Caribbean, has the highest ratio in the world of Nobel Prize winners to its population. Two winners were born in St. Lucia: Sir Arthur Lewis won for Economics in 1979, and Derek Walcott won for Literature in 1992.

Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown was an 18th-19th century US editor and writer of Gothic novels. One of his more popular novels was Arthur Mervyn. he died of TB at the age of 39.