The Battle of the Books
Jonathan Swift worked for William Temple during the time of the controversy, and Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" (1703/1705) takes part in the debate. From its first publication, Swift added a short satire entitled "The Battle of the Books" to the "Tale of a Tub." In this piece, there is an epic battle fought in a library when various books come alive and attempt to settle the arguments between moderns and ancients. In Swift's satire, he skilfully manages to avoid saying which way victory fell. He portrays the manuscript as having been damaged in places, thus leaving the end of the battle up to the reader.
Armistead Maupin
"Tales of the City" is a series of novels, the first portions of which were published initially as a newspaper serial starting on August 8, 1974, in a Marin County newspaper, "The Pacific Sun", picked up in 1976 by the "San Francisco Chronicle", and later reworked into the series of books published by HarperCollins (then Harper and Row). The first of Maupin's novels, entitled "Tales of the City", was published in 1978. Five more followed in the 1980s, ending with the last book, "Sure of You", in 1989. A seventh novel published in 2007, "Michael Tolliver Lives", continues the story of some of the characters. It was followed by an eighth volume, "Mary Ann in Autumn", published in 2010 and a ninth and final volume, "The Days of Anna Madrigal", in 2014. In "Babycakes", published in 1983, Maupin was one of the first writers to address the subject of AIDS. Of the autobiographical nature of the characters, he says "I've always been all of the characters in one way or another."