The first draft of the classic American novel 'Of Mice and Men' was torn to shreds by John Steinbeck's dog.

Before he was a famous novelist, John Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery.

The Nobel Prize committee was not enthusiastic about selecting John Steinbeck, whom they considered past his prime.

Carol Steinbeck, John Steinbeck's first wife, played an integral role in producing 'The Grapes of Wrath.'

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Twain ruthlessly criticized other writers

The writer was known for lambasting popular writers of his time, including Jane Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson. One of his most famous takedowns is “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” an essay that simultaneously mocks Cooper’s popular adventure tales and satirizes the pretentiousness of literary criticism. Remarking on Cooper’s novel “The Deerslayer,” Twain wrote, “its conversations are—oh! Indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.”

John Steinbeck's philosophical ideas, which he often explored in his novels, wrestled with the role of the individual and the power of community.

A beginner's guide to the books of John Steinbeck, one of America's great novelists.

‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ was a letter to an editor

Wolfe pitched a story about custom-made cars to Esquire with a satirical angle. While struggling to actually put the piece together, he explained to the editor what he wanted it to be. The editor published the letter as is, removing the greeting. The seminal article became a book of essays.

An academic on why the animals in 'Animal Farm' matter

Although Orwell intentionally wrote his 1945 novella as an allegory of the Russian Revolution, Charlotte Sleigh—an associate professor of science and technology—argues that the text can also be used to understand (and complicate) our relationship with the nonhuman world.

A book series aimed at World War II soldiers helped popularize works like 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Of Mice and Men.'

John Steinbeck often drew a pig with wings next to his signature, a character he affectionately called 'Pigasus.'

Tove Jansson's illustrations for 'The Hobbit' rankled some of its diehard fans

The Nordic illustrator was asked to contribute illustrations for the 1960 Swedish translation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit." Some fans were critical, though, arguing that the images didn't accurately represent Tolkien's Middle-earth. One of their most convincing pieces of evidence was Jansson's portrayal of Gollum, which she turned into a massive beast. After seeing it, Tolkien realized he needed to specify that the character was "a small, slimy creature."

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ in three days, then burned it

Stevenson woke from a dream and instantly got to writing the “fine bogey tale” he’d witnessed in his sleep. He finished a draft three days later and read it to his wife, who suggested it needed revising. Stevenson eventually agreed and threw the manuscript into the fireplace. He got back to work and emerged three more days later with another draft.

19th-century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy made a mean macaroni and cheese

He may be best known as the author of classics like "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," but he was also an amateur chef, something that was revealed with the publication of "Leo Tolstoy's Family Recipe Book," which includes a rather open-ended recipe for macaroni and cheese.

Dickens' pet inspired Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven'

Dickens had a pet raven named Grip and made him a character in the novel "Barnaby Rudge: a Tale of the Riots of Eighty." Poe reviewed the work and suggested the raven should play a bigger role. A few years later, he fixed the problem himself when he wrote his most famous poem, "The Raven." The bird is preserved at the Free Library Philadelphia.

Kurt Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle' was inspired by the bombing of Hiroshima

The writer fought in World War II and witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, which he recounted in 1969's satirical "Slaughterhouse Five." Six years earlier, though, he wrote about the bombing of Hiroshima in "Cat's Cradle," channeling some of the horror he witnessed in Dresden to write about the dropping of the atomic bomb. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Stephen King’s wife rescued his first hit from the trash

In 1972, King began working on a story about a telekinetic high school girl but abandoned the story just a few pages into the first draft. Luckily, his wife, Tabitha, found the manuscript in a trash bin and encouraged him to continue working on it. That story would become King’s first book, “Carrie,” which was published in 1974 and went on to sell millions of copies, establishing King as a household name following Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation.

Unpacking Thoreau's diet, which once included a woodchuck

The writer's diet was notoriously simple, preferring an inexpensive combination of rice and vegetables to meat, though he usually ate it when offered. In "Walden," he mentions eating a woodchuck after it got into his beans, which one Thoreau biographer said was likely true.

A gallery of famous artists and their dogs

Picasso often featured his photographer's dog, Lump, in paintings, due to an unusually close connection. George O'Keeffe adopted chow chows as companions and protectors in the New Mexico desert. See the pets of Lucian Freud, Frida Kahlo, and more.

Court documents reveal how Anthropic destroyed millions of books to build its AI models

Anthropic cut the bindings from purchased books and discarded them after scanning to rapidly collect high-quality text at low cost for training Claude. This, despite hiring the former head of partnerships for the Google Books project, which nondestructively scanned millions of books borrowed from libraries before returning them.

The 'Howl' obscenity trial changed American publishing

The "Howl" obscenity trial is one of the most significant in American publishing, affirming that material with the "slightest redeeming social importance" cannot be considered "obscene." In the process, it permits artists, like Allen Ginsberg, to use the language they see fit to express themselves.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

The story behind David Bowie's failed '1984' musical

The musician hoped to adapt Orwell's dystopian novel for the stage, though the project floundered after Orwell's widow—who found Bowie's vision in poor taste—refused to grant him the rights. Several of the project's songs—including "Big Brother" and "1984"—eventually appeared on Bowie's 1974 album "Diamond Dogs."

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

The forgotten campaign to replace the Teddy Bear with 'Billy Possum'

After a 1909 pre-inauguration dinner for incoming President William Howard Taft featured possums and potatoes as the main course, Susie W. Allgood wanted to produce and market an alternative to the Teddy Roosevelt-inspired teddy bear: Billy Possum. Kids thought it looked too much like a rat.

'Beowulf' was almost lost in a fire

In 1731, the poem's lone manuscript was stored in Ashburnham House, in Westminster, England. The building caught fire, and the document was damaged, but not entirely destroyed. It then had to be repaired and reordered, with help from Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín.

The myths around London's tiniest sculpture

The Philpot Lane mice have been considered London's smallest sculpture for decades, delighting visitors and locals alike. But there's a common story told for why the unusual sculpture—which features two mice fighting for a piece of cheese—was placed there, saying it commemorated the death of a construction worker fighting over a lunch in the 1800s. The author of this article argues the evidence for such a story is lacking. Dive into the obscure history here.

Some say baseball's drug problem goes back to the late 1800s

At age 32, pitcher James “Pud” Galvin was feeling tired and decided to take "the Brown-Séquard elixir," which contained a testicular fluid from dogs and guinea pigs, believed to invigorate tired bodies. It might've worked: Galvin pitched a two-hit shutout the next day.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.