Hawthorne's son, Julian, was also a writer and father and son were frequently mistaken for each other. "Oh, Mr Hawthorne, I've just read The Scarlet Letter, and I think it's a real masterpiece," gushed a lady to whom Julian Hawthorne had just been introduced. "Oh, that," said Julian, shrugging modestly, "that was written when I was only four years old."

Chesterton's mind was so preoccupied that he frequently forgot to keep appointments. He relied on his wife in all practical matters. Once on a lecture tour he sent her the following telegram: "Am in Birmingham. Where ought I to be?" She wired back: "Home."

Conditions were rather cramped oin the Detroit concert hall where Schumann-Heink was to perform. As the portly singer struggled through the orchestra pit to make her entrance, music racks crashed to the floor. The conductor looked on in alarm. "Sideways, madam," he whispered urgently, "go sideways."

"Mein Gott!" cried the singer in reply. "I haff no sideways!"

After his election to the U.S. Senate in 1934, Truman was amused by the advice he received from an old judge he had worked with on the county court, who had once worked for a Senator in Washington. "Harry," he said, "don't you go to the Senate with an inferiority complex. You'll sit there about six months, and wonder how you got there. But after that you'll wonder how the rest of them got there.

When Clement Moore wrote his poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," his most profound inspiration came from a keen appreciation of his audience. He wasn't writing for publication, but to delight his own six children. To that end, he transformed the legendary figure of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children, into Santa Claus, a fairy tale character for children.
Moore himself was a dour, straitlaced academician and a professor of classics. The year he wrote the poem, he refused to have it published, despite its enthusiastic reception by everyone who read it. The following Christmas "A Visit from St. Nicholas" found its way into the mass media when a family member submitted it to an out-of-town newspaper. The poem (also known by the title " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas") was an "overnight sensation," as we would say today, but Moore was not to acknowledge authorship of it until fifteen years later, when he reluctantly included it in a volume of collected works. He called the poem "a mere trifle."

The irony of this, according to Duncan Emrich (author of Folklore on the American Land), is that for all his protestations, Professor Clement Clarke Moore is now remembered for little else at all.