To tone your thighs fast - three words ladies - squats and walking lunges. I took a fitness bootcamp for women last fall. We met three times a week and these two exercises were at the core of each meeting. My husband noticed a difference after week one.
Don Quijote de la Manca by the Spanish author Cervantes has such a role in the Western literary tradition, that it's hard to mention anything posterior to it as the first fiction novel. Jerry mentioned Moll Flanders. That's a nice pick: the very novel that combined literature of roguery and picaresque novel.
It seems the first people who wrote were the Sumerians and the Egyptians around 3500-3200 BC. It is not clear which of those two peoples invented writing first, although it seems the Egyptian writing had some Sumerian influence and not vice versa.