Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
In the 1956 studio album Ella Fitzgerald Covers the Cole Porter Song Book, Ella Fitzgerald covers “You’re the Top” from the 1934 musical Anything Goes, and in the last verse sings “You’re a rose, you’re Inferno’s Dante.”
Contributed by Victoria Nicholls (The Bolles School ’22)
“Young published three different books inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Hell Up to Date: The Reckless Journey of R. Palasco Drant, Newspaper Correspondent, Through the Infernal Regions, As Reported by Himself was his first book, published in 1894. Its success led to Through Hell with Hiprah Hunt, in 1901.
“Art Young’s Inferno: A Journey Through Hell Six Hundred Years After Dante, published in 1934, is considered one of Young’s masterpieces.” — Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, “Art Young: A Cartoonist for the Ages,” The New Yorker, August 2, 2017
“More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of short prose by Samuel Beckett, first published in 1934. The stories chart the life of the book’s main character, Belacqua Shuah, from his days as a student to his accidental death. Beckett takes the name Belacqua from a figure in Dante’s Purgatorio, a Florentine lute-maker famed for his laziness. . . The opening story, ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ features Belacqua’s horrified reaction to the discovery that the lobster he has bought for dinner must be boiled alive. ‘It’s a quick death, God help us all’, Belacqua tells himself, before the narrator’s stern interjection to the contrary: ‘It is not.'” —Wikipedia
