Entrants in the contest seek to capture the rapid changes in point of view, the florid language, and the atmosphere of the full sentence. The opening was popularized by the "Peanuts" comic strip, in which Snoopy's sessions on the typewriter usually began with "It was a dark and stormy night". The same words also form the first sentence of Madeleine L'Engle's Newbery Medal-winning novel "A Wrinkle in Time". Similar wording appears in Edgar Allan Poe's 1831 short story "The Bargain Lost", although not at the very beginning. It reads: