• Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point in 1831 when he appeared at a parade in his birthday suit.


• Agatha Christie wrote several mysteries about people getting poisoned. She really knew about chemicals because she worked in a hospital laboratory during World War I. Christie once considered a career in opera.


• Though he was not blind but had failing eyesight, Aldous Huxley learned Braille so that he might rest his pained eyes without having to give up reading, which he so enjoyed. One of the compensations, Huxley said, was the pleasure of reading in bed in the dark, with book and hands snugly under the bedclothes.


• Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, embarks on the career of a romantic at 23, when he fights his first duel, during which his trousers fall down.


• While still in his mid-teens, Arthur Rimbaud revolutionized French poetry. His poems had a hallucinatory dream-world quality. Then at the age of 19, he abandoned his writing career and became a traveling salesman. (He smuggled guns into the Ethiopian jungle and lived there with his African harem. He died at 37, in Marseilles, following the amputation of a gangrenous leg.)


• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was an ophthalmologist by profession.


• Because of his spindly arms and legs, the satirist Alexander Pope was described as a "crazy little carcass" of a man. To keep his miniature body erect he wore stiff canvas. To swell his pin-sized legs toward normal-size, he wore three pairs of stockings.


• For the last 12 years of his life, Casanova was a librarian.


• Charles Darwin cured his snuff habit by keeping his snuffbox in the basement and the key for the snuffbox in the attic.


• Charles Dickens had to be facing north before he could write a word. He was also an insomniac and always had to be in the middle of the bed, which had to be pointed in a northerly direction, so that he would be aligned with the poles.

Sources: A Book of Days for the Literary Year, ed. Neal T. Jones; The Emperor who Ate the Bible: and more Strange Facts and Useless Information, by Scot Morris; Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts, by Isaac Asimov; www.publishingcentral.com.