Your Pick of the Litter: Four Online Exclusive Literary Cats!

Bram Stoker (Bram Stroker | 1847 – 1912) was an Irish author most notable for the seminal Gothic horror novel, Dracula. One of the most famous novels in the vampire literary canon, Dracula has inspired countless other pieces of art, fields of study, and fiction (Nos-fur-atu, anyone?).

Cats don’t take center stage in Dracula – at least, not in a way cat lovers would approve of – but our favorite animals manage to get their lick back in Stoker’s short story, The Squaw, where a mother cat gets gruesome revenge on a man who’s killed her kitten. As it turns out, Dracula isn’t the only thing that goes bump in the night – and even the sweetest pets can occasionally draw blood.

Madeleine L’Engle (Madeleine L’Bengal | 1918 – 2007) was an American author of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction novels for both adults and children. A fur-midable writer, she wrote many books in her lifetime, including the Newbery Award winning A Wrinkle in Time and the accompanying Time Quintet. 

The L’Engle family had plenty of pets, and a few of them sported some stellar literary names! Here’s a short sampling for your viewing pleasure:

Brillig, Narcissus (Cissie), Tybalt, and (obviously) Tesseract.

Roald Dahl (Roald Ragdoll | 1916 – 1990) was a British writer known for his children’s books and short stories. Since chocolate is toxic for cats, it’s highly unlikely that they’d be taking a trip to Wonka’s factory, but they’re featured in a few of his other stories like The Witches and Edward the Conqueror.

Fun fact: Dahl invented a few fun words of his own, like frumptious! As per the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary, frumptious means “marvelous” or “wonderful”.

For the record, we think the Literary Cats Coloring Book is absolutely frumptious, and we’re sure you’ll think the same when you try it out for yourself!

Tennessee Williams (Tennessee Will-Iams Cat Food | 1911 – 1983) was an American playwright and screenwriter known for the works, *A Street Cat Named Desire, *Sweet Bird-Eaters of Youth, and of course, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. 

Of course, the real names of the first two plays are A Streetcar Named Desire and Sweet Birds of Youth, but if you’re ever feline like reading some of his lesser known work, Williams also happened to pen a collection of one-act plays called Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws. 

Whether you decide to read the text of his plays or watch a few of their famous adaptations, you cat – er, can’t go wrong!

Andrew Shaffer is the New York Times bestselling author of the Obama Biden Mysteries from Quirk Books, including the instant national bestseller Hope Never Dies. His latest novel is Feel the Bern: A Bernie Sanders Mystery (Ten Speed Press/Penguin Random House). In 2013, Shaffer published Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors (Harper Perennial), a nonfiction look at the lives of some of the writing world’s most scandalous authors, from Oscar Wilde to Ernest Hemingway. 

As an artist, Shaffer’s illustrations and designs have been featured in magazines such as Heavy Metal and FHM and on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. An Iowa native, Shaffer lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, novelist and screenwriter Meg Shaffer, and two cats, MoonPie and Sweet Guillermo Jones. The cats are *unpublished.

*for now, anyway.