<P> In 1814, Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769--1844), poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant . The phrase became proverbial . Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel' Demons' wrote,' Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum ...' </P> <P> The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, in The New York Times on June 20, 1959: "Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room . It's so big you just can't ignore it ." </P> <P> This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959 . For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of a British journal, Journal of Education, in 1915 . The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of a question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class - room?" </P> <P> The first widely disseminated conceptual reference was a story written by Mark Twain in 1882, "The Stolen White Elephant", which slyly dissects the inept, far - ranging activities of detectives trying to find an elephant that was right on the spot after all . This may have been the reference in the legal opinion of United States v. Leviton, 193 F. 2d 848 (2nd Circuit, 1951), makes reference in its opinion, "As I have elsewhere observed, it is like the Mark Twain story of the little boy who was told to stand in a corner and not to think of a white elephant ." </P>

Where did the elephant in the room come from