It’s time for a history lesson. In 1815, Mount Tambora, a composite volcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, reached a cataclysmic eruption that killed scores of people with its eruptive fallout and tsunamis. It also threw the Earth’s seasons out of whack, creating a long-term negative effect on the global climate.

North Americans and Europeans were acutely affected, and livestock deaths resulted in the worst famine of the 19th century. 1815 became known as The Year Without a Summer, the Poverty Year, and, the ever popular, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.

1815 was also the year that Mary Shelley had planned to spend the summer of 1815 in a cabin on Lake Geneva with her husband, Percy, and close friend, Lord Byron –  every English major’s fantasy sleepover.  But because of the fluke in weather, the party was forced to spend the entire summer in doors, ultimately leading to the creation of Frankenstein, one of the most heralded science fiction stories ever written. Read more »

It’s a rare–and highly interesting–phenomenon when the success of a character overwhelms even its creator.

A. A. Milne found Winnie the Pooh’s popularity a source of profound annoyance. Despite his credentials as an established author and playwright, few took his “adult” work seriously after the success of Pooh.

J. M. Barrie had the same troubles with Peter Pan, who entirely overshadowed Barrie’s other works, past and future.

Better-known are the woes of Arthur Conan Doyle. The writer absolutely hated Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle believed was distracting him from his more important literary pursuits. So plagued by the stature of his own creation, Conan Doyle resorted to throwing Holmes off a cliff in 1893. Public demand and financial need prompted Conan Doyle to revive the famous detective a decade later. The detective has not died since. Read more »