the happy valley
The dude in Bombay is, of course, blatantly ripping off an annual contest that Canadians have been doing for several decades now. Notably, the Canadians would actually *publish* their favorite 72-hour novel every year...
Indeed! Though some of their literary scholarship is a bit suspect.
Ernest Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring in a fit of inspiration that kept him going from the 20th to the 26th of November 1925. Just to show that it wasn't a fluke he wrote Rasselas in 7 days in 1951. This time, however, it was the need to pay for his mother's funeral rather than the touch of the muse which kept him going.
The second part of that paragraph is true enough, assuming you replace "Ernest Hemingway" with "Samuel Johnson" and "1951" with "1759." I can't speak for their other claims—though I have no doubt that Stephen King could dash off a novel in 72 hours, once upon a time. I can't find any bits of 3-day novels online, which is a shame. I was hoping they would all read like Rasselas.
