"WHO THE HELL IS PANSY O'HARA?" by Chris Sheedy and Jenny Bond; Penguin, 336 pages

Former journalist Peggy Marsh had been quietly working on her novel for more than a decade when she was discovered by a publisher who was scouring the South for new authors. Starring a heroine named Pansy O'Hara, Marsh's manuscript was a theatrical, longing ode to the lost, pre-Civil War era in the Deep South. Its working title: "Tomorrow Is Another Day."

By the time the novel was published a year later, in 1936, Pansy had become Scarlett, and Marsh had reverted to her maiden name, Margaret Mitchell. And her title famously had been transformed into the more poignant "Gone With The Wind."

This is just one of the literary morsels offered in "Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?" (Penguin, $13 in paper), a compilation of the little-known back stories behind 50 of the world's most famous books.

"When you understand the book's history or something about the author or what influenced his or her work, you can't help but have a finer appreciation for the book, for the art work," Chris Sheedy, the Australian who wrote "Who the Hell ...?" with his wife, Jenny Bond, says from their home in Sydney. "We were looking for wonderful pieces of information that told us something more."

So Bond and Sheedy set out to write a book about books, to unveil shadowed truths by journeying through the authors' minds, lives, loves and inspirations. A broader knowledge of an author, they say, makes for a richer reading experience.

Among the works they investigated: "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen; "The Hound of the Baskervilles," by Arthur Conan Doyle; "For Whom The Bell Tolls," by Ernest Hemingway; "The Cat in the Hat," by Dr. Seuss; Mario Puzo's" The Godfather"; Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," by J.K. Rowling.

The book's fiction section spans almost two centuries, from "Pride and Prejudice" (1813) to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" (2003). The nonfiction section includes "The English Dictionary," by Samuel Johnson (1755), "All the President's Men," by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1974) and Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" (1988).

Readers learn that, once its pages were stacked, Mitchell's manuscript towered almost five feet — taller than she — and that she had hidden parts of it under the carpet; that Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" was rejected by every publisher to which it was originally sent; that for her "Bridget Jones's Diary" — conceived as a column chronicling the experiences of a 30-something single woman in London — Helen Fielding used "Pride and Prejudice" as a template. Readers also learn that Ian Fleming, author of "Casino Royale," was part of the team that cracked the Nazis' Enigma code and that 20,000 readers canceled their subscriptions to The Strand mystery magazine after Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in order to concentrate on more serious writing projects. He was later forced to revive the character for "The Hound of the Baskervilles," but set the story prior to the detective's death.

Bond and Sheedy, 37-year-old freelance journalists who have been married for 13 years, came up with the idea during a literary conversation over dinner. In some ways, the project was a natural. Bond had once taught high-school English and drama, and Sheedy, a former vice president of Guinness World Records, keenly appreciated the reading public's appetite for trivia.

So for 18 months of evenings and weekends — son Sam was born halfway through — the couple began whittling down a list of dozens of contenders, then visited libraries, studied academic papers and pored over the Internet in search of obscure and quirky facts.

"We would have dinner with friends and argue about what books should make the cut," Sheedy says. "The list changed many times."

Bond still remembers introducing her students to her favorite book, "Emma," and how they had been moved by the story-behind-the-story Bond had pieced together about Austen's family tragedies, which included a handicapped brother sent away to live with another family, another brother adopted and an aunt wrongly imprisoned for theft.

"The realization was for me that once they came to know Jane Austen's back story, they began to discuss the reasons that Austen put her characters in certain situations and the reasons that characters reacted certain ways," Bond says. "The students looked deeper into the book as a work of art created by a specific and special person."

THINK YOU KNOW LITERATURE?

Test your knowledge of literary trivia found in "Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?" by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy. Match the following statements with the book titles listed. Answers appear below.

1. Which book was saved by the author's wife, who rescued it from the trash and encouraged her husband to finish it?

2. Which book gets stolen most from libraries?

3. Which book was reportedly based on Carole Landis, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland and Ethel Merman?

4. What was the original name for Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"?

5. Which book was burned by angry Californians for its portrayal of migrant working conditions?

6. Which book was influenced by its author's violent childhood?

7. Which book took almost 40 years to complete?

8. Which book was written by someone who was shot in the neck 10 days after joining the Spanish Civil War?

9. Which book was written as filler for a chapter in a magazine?

10. Which 3,000-page manuscript was copied seven times by hand by the author's wife?

A. "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

B. "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells

C. "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

D. "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak

E. "Guinness World Records"

F. "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann

G. "First Impressions"

H. "Carrie" by Stephen King

I. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

J. "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck

QUIZ ANSWERS: 1, H; 2, E; 3, F; 4, G; 5, J; 6, I; 7, D; 8, B; 9, A; 10, C

— McClatchy-Tribune News Service