What Dreams May Come

Who are These People?

Some of you may have noticed that there is a LOT of literary references in this story. I wanted to make a chapter dedicated to people who were curious about who my characters are named after, as well as some of the phrases I use. 

Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion". He died young from medical complications

Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian-born French composer, instrumentalist, and dancer who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. He is considered a master of the French baroque style.

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. She was also an abolitionist.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul, and constitutionalist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. He wrote The Misanthrope, a play that Levi reads to Dylan

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American playwright and author of many stage classics. He is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th-century American drama

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (spelled O'Keefe in the story) was an American artist. She is best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre.

The Brothers Grimm were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing during the 19th century. 

Anatoly Nikolayevich Alexandrov  was a Russian composer of works for piano and for other instruments, and a pianist. His initial works had a mystical element, but he downplayed this to better fit Socialist Realism.

Reinhold Moritzevich Glière was a Russian composer of German-Polish ancestry.

Lisel Mueller is an American poet. She won the U.S. National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

David Abelevich Kaufman — also known as his pseudonym Dziga Vertov— was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist.

Ivy Priaulx Rainier was a South African-British composer. Although she lived most of her life in England and died in France, her compositional style was strongly influenced by the African music remembered from her childhood

Oscar-Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature.

Paul Jackson Pollock, known professionally as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

Florence Nightingale was a celebrated English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing.

Alan Mathison Turing was a pioneering British computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist.