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.
The Gremlins has a very good claim to being Roald Dahl's first piece of writing for children. It is certainly one of the first stories he ever wrote. He began work on it in 1942, soon after his first paid piece of writing, Shot Down Over Libya, was published in the Saturday Evening Post.