Life inspires fiction

The surprising real-life anecdotes behind 10 classic novels

Many great books stem from real-life stories, but we often ignore to what degree. Few people know that, before Moby-Dick, there was a real whale that sank a ship and left its crew adrift for 90 days. Or that it was the four Alcott sisters living in Massachusetts who inspired the four March sisters from Little Women. The ten novels in this article have collectively sold hundreds of millions of copies; here are the true stories behind 10 of the most famous books ever written.

In the summer of 1816, the famous British poet Lord Byron was hosting a remarkable group in his rented home in Switzerland. Byron, Percy Shelley, and 18-year-old Mary Godwin found themselves one night having a conversation about galvanism and the possibility of reanimating corpses. Mary immediately conceived the idea for the ghost story that Byron had dared all of his guests to write.

It took her two years, and by age 20, Mary Godwin had become Mary Shelley and had published the novel about "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." The Gothic novel was published anonymously until 1831, when a revised edition recognized her as its author.

Another of Byron's guests that summer, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre (1818) following the same dare. This book became a direct inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The world's most famous fictional detective was a real person, and we know it because his creator said so in writing. Conan Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell when he was studying to be a doctor at the University of Edinburgh in 1877. Bell's powers of diagnosis were extraordinary, and he often used to demonstrate the importance of close observation by selecting strangers and deducing their recent activities simply by observing them.

In a letter from Conan Doyle to Bell dated 1892, Conan Doyle wrote that Holmes’s analytical work was "not in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward." Bell had such renown that he also served as a personal surgeon to Queen Victoria during her visits to Edinburgh.

In 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale rammed and sank the Essex, an American whaling ship, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. The crew of 21 men escaped in small boats.

They spent 90 days adrift in the Pacific with dwindling supplies and were forced to make desperate choices. The remaining crew members needed to resort to cannibalism, and only 8 of the 21 survived. The ship's captain was George Pollard Jr., who returned to Nantucket and went to sea again on another ship, only to be shipwrecked a second time.

Author Herman Melville encountered Pollard once, briefly, on Nantucket. He wrote: "To the islanders, he was a nobody. To me, the most impressive man, tho' wholly unassuming, even humble, that I ever encountered." Melville turned this concept into a novel that became a quintessential American classic.

Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write this book. In 1868, her publisher asked her to write "a book for girls." She protested, but it was her need for money that drove her to comply.

In her journal, she wrote: "Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." Fortunately for literature, she was wrong. She wrote the entire first volume in just ten weeks. In it, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March were in real life Anna, Louy, Lizzy, and May Alcott.

She modeled the characters of the mother and the father on her own. The Alcott family had known Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as personal friends and neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott later attributed the book's success to its simplicity and truth. Her novel has never been out of print since 1868.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a young student at Princeton in 1915 when he met Ginevra King at a party. She was a socialite: popular, pretty, and very rich. Fitzgerald idealized her and tried to court her through letters, to no avail. Later, Fitzgerald overheard a comment he recorded in his own journal: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."

Fitzgerald would always remember the role Ginevra's wealth seemed to play in the breakup. This inspired him to write about the corrupting power of money over love in American life.

The novel was also inspired by the parties he attended in Long Island in 1922 with his wife, Zelda. Their glamorous, wealthy neighbors on one side of the bay contrasted sharply with the old-money families across the water, giving Fitzgerald the idea for West Egg and East Egg.

One day in 1862, Lewis Carroll took ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boat trip from near Oxford, where they had a picnic. Alice begged him to tell a story, so he invented tales on the spot about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had fantastical adventures.

Alice Liddell asked him to write it down. So he did: he spent the next two years expanding and illustrating the story by hand, presenting the completed manuscript to Alice in 1864, as a Christmas gift.

He titled it Alice's Adventures Under Ground. A friend persuaded him to publish it, and he did so in 1865 under a pen name: Lewis Carroll, concealing his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

In the summer of 1881, Stevenson settled with his wife, Fanny, and his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, in a cottage in Braemar, Scotland. Lloyd was confined inside because of the rain and amused himself by drawing a map of an imaginary island.

Stevenson joined him and began adding names to the map: Spyglass Hill, Skeleton Island, a stockade, and a cross marking buried treasure. Stevenson recalled that, before he knew it, he was scribbling down character names and even a list of chapters. He completed the first draft of chapter one the following morning.

Unfortunately, the original map was later lost in the mail when the manuscript was sent to the publisher. Stevenson had to redraw it entirely from memory. The character of Long John Silver was partly inspired by Stevenson's friend W.E. Henley, the poet who wrote Invictus and who, like Silver, had one leg.

Vlad the Impaler was born in 1431 in Transylvania, the second son of Vlad II Dracul. His surname "Dracula" meant "son of Dracul," which derived from the Latin draco, meaning "dragon," after his father's induction into a Christian military order called the Order of the Dragon.

Vlad earned his nickname for impaling more than 20,000 people during his Medieval reign and killing as many as 60,000 others. He was said to dine among his impaled enemies. Bram Stoker never visited Romania, but he came across a book about Wallachia in 1890, afterward writing in his research notes: "Dracula in Wallachian language means DEVIL". Stoker borrowed the name and the Transylvanian setting. His vampire novel was published in 1897 to immediate success.

In 1704, a 27-year-old Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk made a desperate decision: he demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, after quarreling with the captain of his ship.

The captain agreed. Selkirk lived alone on the rugged 29-square-mile island for more than four years, subsisting on fish, lobster, goats, and seals, until he was rescued by a passing ship in 1709.

Writer Daniel Defoe, in England, read the published accounts about Selkirk's ordeal. He drew on them for his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, though scholars note that Defoe wove in details from many other castaway narratives. The Selkirk connection became so embedded in history that the Chilean government renamed the island from "Más a Tierra" to "Robinson Crusoe Island" in 1966 to attract tourists.

In 1872, Leo Tolstoy read about a well-dressed woman jumping in front of a train at a railway station near his estate outside Moscow. Tolstoy and his wife, Sofia, knew the woman: she was Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, the 35-year-old mistress of one of the Tolstoys' closest neighbors. It was a landowner named Bibikov, who had abandoned her for the family's German governess.

Tolstoy became haunted by the circumstances surrounding Anna’s death. He put aside his ambitious project on Peter the Great and wrote a new story about a respected noblewoman who has an adulterous affair with an aristocrat. Anna Karenina was first serialized between 1875 and 1877 and published as a complete book in 1878. Writer Vladimir Nabokov called it "the greatest novel ever written."

Hospital secrets

What is a "Code Gray" and what you should know if you hear it at the E.R.

A trip to the emergency room can be stressful enough without hearing doctors and nurses speak a language that sounds like a secret code. One minute, someone is asking for medication "STAT," the next there’s a "Code Gray," and another patient is suddenly "NPO." What do those words really mean? Some are official medical terms, others are insider slang, but they all help hospital staff communicate quickly when every second counts. Here are 10 of those codes explained.

The E.R. can be hectic and unpredictable. Most patients are frightened or uncomfortable, but now and then someone becomes aggressive because of pain, confusion, mental illness, or the effects of alcohol or other substances. That’s when you can hear "Code Gray" announced over the speakers.

The code is used to summon security officers to help manage a violent or combative situation. While color codes vary from one hospital to another, Code Gray commonly signals that staff needs extra assistance to protect patients, visitors, and healthcare workers. Even if you know it now, most people in the waiting room never know what happened, and that’s exactly the point.

You have a scheduled surgery, you’re in your bed waiting to be taken to the surgery room, and you ask for a cup of coffee to make the wait lighter. The nurse will probably tell you you’re an NPO. You may think it’s serious, but it’s simply a procedure.

"NPO" is an abbreviation that comes from the Latin phrase Nil Per Os, which means "nothing by mouth." It tells patients they cannot eat, drink, or sometimes even take medication until doctors say it’s safe. The rule is most common before surgery or certain medical tests, when food or liquids could increase the risk of complications or alter the results. It may be frustrating, but it’s an important part of keeping patients safe.

You’ve probably been through the experience of visiting an emergency room, either to get checked or to visit a loved one. In that part of the hospital where everyone is rushing to save lives, you’ve probably heard a doctor asking for the R.C.P. cart or medication "STAT!" It sounds urgent, and that's because it is.

The expression comes from the Latin statim, which means "immediately" or "without delay." Hospitals have used Latin medical terms for centuries, but STAT is one of the few that remains part of everyday conversation. When a doctor says it, the request jumps to the top of the priority list. It doesn’t always refer to a life-or-death situation, but it does mean the medical team needs something done as quickly as possible.

Newborns are always a reason to celebrate at the hospital. Parents usually rest happily next to their child as they receive congratulations from close relatives. However, the hospital is always prepared to handle extremely rare emergencies under "code pink."

If you hear a "Code Pink," it usually means a baby or young child is suspected of being abducted from the hospital. Within seconds, security officers respond, exits may be monitored or blocked, and staff begins following carefully rehearsed procedures. Although different hospitals sometimes use different color codes, Code Pink has become widely recognized across North America as one of the most serious alerts a hospital can issue.

If you’ve ever spent a few days in the hospital, you’ve probably noticed that some patients are walking up and down the halls, while others need help just getting out of bed. When a nurse refers to someone as a "walkie-talkie," it’s actually good news.

This informal expression refers to patients who can walk on their own, use the bathroom without assistance, and handle most basic tasks independently. It’s not an official medical term, of course, but it’s commonly used among healthcare workers because it quickly tells the next shift that the patient requires less hands-on care than many others.

As nurses change shifts, you’ll often hear them give a quick report about each patient. One person may only need medication, while another is described as a "total."

The term is short for a patient who requires total care. They may need help eating, bathing, getting dressed, turning in bed, or moving from one place to another. Although the expression sounds impersonal, it’s simply a practical way for caregivers to communicate how much assistance someone needs.

Most people hear "frequent flyer" and think of an airline reward program. And that’s correct, but in an emergency room, the phrase has a very different meaning.

A frequent flyer is an informal nickname for patients who repeatedly return to the hospital, often due to chronic illness, recurring medical conditions, or other ongoing health issues. Behind the light-hearted nickname is often a difficult reality. Many of these patients are simply dealing with medical problems that require regular emergency care, and the expression is just a way to make the experience a bit lighter among the familiar faces of doctors and nurses.

Not all codes are for patients. The next time you’re in a hospital, look closely at what the nurse is pushing from room to room. It may look like a small rolling desk with a computer on top. Staff often call it a "WOW," short for "workstation on wheels."

As hospitals switched from paper charts to electronic medical records, these mobile computers became essential. Nurses use them to review test results, scan medications, update patient charts, and check doctors’ orders without leaving the bedside. The name sounds funny, but the technology helps caregivers spend more time with patients instead of walking back and forth to a nursing station.

After getting a shot or having blood drawn, most patients never think about where the used needle ends up. It certainly doesn't go into an ordinary trash can.

Hospitals place needles, scalpels, and other sharp medical instruments into special containers designed to prevent accidental injuries. These sturdy, puncture-resistant boxes are sealed when full and safely disposed of in accordance with strict health regulations. This not only protects nurses, but it also protects cleaning crews, waste handlers, and even the public from dangerous needle sticks. It’s one of the most important safety measures in every hospital, even though most patients never notice it.

If you’ve ever watched a medical drama, you've probably seen a patient become so agitated that several staff members rush into the room. In situations like that, a doctor or nurse may ask for a "B-52." But the name has nothing to do with numbers themselves; it actually comes from a medicine.

B-52 is hospital slang for a fast-acting injection used to calm down patients who are severely combative or at risk of harming themselves or others. The nickname comes from a commonly used combination of medications that usually include diphenhydramine, haloperidol, and lorazepam. It’s strictly reserved for when other methods of calming the patient haven’t worked.