Some of the most beloved characters in literary history did not spring entirely from a writer's imagination. They were borrowed, piece by piece, from real flesh-and-blood human beings who walked the ...

It might sound strange, but many people feel stronger emotional connections to fictional characters than to people in their everyday lives. Whether it’s the quiet vulnerability of Shinji Ikari from ...

We know characters in fiction as well as we know many, and perhaps most, of the people around us. Yet fictional characters are often sketched remarkably lightly. In the more than 800 pages of ...