The Old English classic, written in 1100 A.D. is fraught with fire-breathing dragons, severed heads and the gobbling of sleeping Danes, drunk on ale. Geoffrey Chaucer imagined 30 pilgrims with four tales each to tell on their travels to and from Canterbury. See also Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities. In the 1930s, an unpublished Atlanta woman dropped off a manuscript that filled a large suitcase at the door of a publisher. The work had no first chapter, just various versions of one, and large segments were missing.
Tomorrow is Another Day.
In a valiant effort, those loose papers eventually morphed into 1936's runaway best seller Gone With the Wind. Raskolnikov, a poor student, struggles with his nightmarish guilt and diseased conscience after killing a pawnbroker. This is the plot of Kate Chopin 's novel The Awakening, published in 1899. At the turn of the century, this portrait of a self-determined woman exploring her sexual and emotional identity so shocked the reading public that Chopin never recovered from the ensuing scandal. I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.