Editing Appointment in Samarra (section)

==Title==
The title is a reference to [[W. Somerset Maugham]]'s retelling of an ancient [[Mesopotamia]]n tale<ref>One version is recorded in the ''Babylonian Talmud'', [https://www.sefaria.org/Sukkah.53a.5 Sukkah&nbsp;53a.5-6] (NB: The Talmud was compiled in the 5th century while Samarrah was founded in the 9th century; the Talmudic version of the story involves King Solomon sending two men to a place called [[Luz (biblical place)|Luz]] to avoid death.)</ref> which appears as an [[epigraph (literature)|epigraph]] for the novel:<blockquote>There was a merchant in [[Baghdad]] who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was [[Personifications of death|Death]] that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to [[Samarra]] and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.</blockquote>

In his foreword to the 1952 reprint,{{Citation needed |reason=to verify the foreword says this, also check date, Worldcat says 1953 |date=December 2016}} O'Hara says that the working title for the novel was ''The Infernal Grove''. He got the idea for the title ''Appointment in Samarra'' when [[Dorothy Parker]] showed him the story in Maugham's play, [[Sheppey (play)|''Sheppey'']]. He says "Dorothy didn't like the title; [publisher] Alfred Harcourt didn't like the title; his editors didn't like it; nobody liked it but me." O'Hara describes it as a reference to "the inevitability of Julian English's death".