Cyprian Overbeck Wells. A Literary Mosaic is a short story written by Arthur Conan Doyle first published in The Boy's Own Paper in December 1886. Also published as "Cyprian Overbeck Wells". The narrator of the story is passionate about writing. He decides to take a few weeks to write a masterpiece but inspiration does not come. One evening after supper he falls asleep and dreams that the greatest writers of the last few centuries are invited at his table to create a story: William Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lawrence Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, William M. Thackeray, James Payn, Walter Besant, a lady known as "Ouida", Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Captain Marryat...