For those of you who have been eagerly awaiting the exciting conclusion of last week’s six degrees game, here are some chains I came up with (drum roll please). Once again, these are only my off-the-cuff thoughts and there may be more elegant solutions–if you know of one, let’s hear it!
James Joyce to Marianne Moore: Because Joyce and Moore are roughly contemporaries and both had large literary circles, there are a number of potential links here. Christina Deemer correctly suggested Ezra Pound and Shawn Maeder suggested T. S. Eliot. Kudos to both!
Comte de Buffon to Dickens: Buffon to Jefferson (who sparred in correspondence and in print with Buffon over the status of American fauna) to Washington Irving (who caricatured Jefferson in A History of New York) to Dickens
Rebecca Gratz to Lewis Carroll: Gratz to Sully to Queen Victoria (painted by Sully in 1838) to Tennyson (who was appointed Poet Laureate by Victoria) to Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll
Lincoln to Sendak: Lincoln to Emerson (they met at the White House in February 1862) to Hawthorne to Melville to Sendak
Austen to Wilde: Austen to Anne Hathaway (portrayed Austen in Becoming Jane) to Stephen Fry (appeared with Hathaway in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) to Wilde (portrayed by Fry in Wilde)
You’re on your own for the Kevin Bacon connections!
Kevin Bacon's father Edmund Bacon attended one of the early Rosenbacchanals. I sat next to him at the dinner.