Category Archives: The Dead Writers Round-Up

The Dead Writers Round-Up: May 18th-20th

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  • Nathaniel Hawthorne died on 5/18/1864. “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true.” (The Scarlet Letter; The House of the Seven Gables; The Blithedale Romance; Twice-Told Tales)
  • George Meredith died on 5/18/1909. “There is nothing the body suffers the soul may not profit by.” (The Adventures of Harry Richmond; Diana of the Crossways; Modern Love)
  • William Saroyan died on 5/18/1981. “No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend, and there are many more of these than one would expect.” (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze; The Human Comedy; The Time of Your Life)
  • James Boswell died on 5/19/1795. “I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.” (The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides; Life of Samuel Johnson) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: May 1st-6th

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  • Joseph Addison was born on 5/1/1672. “A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.” (Cato; numerous essays)
  • John Dryden died on 5/1/1700. “He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.” (Astraea Redux; Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen; All for Love; Amphitryon; King Arthur)
  • Marie Corelli was born on 5/1/1855. “If we choose to be no more than clods of clay, then we shall be used as clods of clay for braver feet to tread on.” (A Romance of Two Worlds; Wormword: A Drama of Paris; The Sorrows of Satan)
  • Joseph Heller was born on 5/1/1923. “Rise above principle and do what’s right.” (Catch-22; Something Happened; Closing Time)
  • Harold Nicolson died on 5/1/1968. “We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.” (Paul Verlaine; Public Faces; Dwight Morrow; King George V)
  • Alfred de Musset died on 5/2/1857. “Great artists have no country.” (Lorenzaccio; Le Chandelier; Bettine; The Confession of a Child of the Century) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: April 17th-19th

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  • Marie de Sévigné died on 4/17/1696. “The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.” (A voluminous correspondence, via letters to her daughter)
  • Isak Dinesen was born on 4/17/1885. “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” (Seven Gothic Tales; Out of Africa; Anecdotes of Destiny)
  • Thornton Wilder was born on 4/17/1897. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” (The Long Christmas Dinner; Our Town; The Merchant of Yonkers; The Skin of Our Teeth; The Matchmaker; The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Ides of March; The Eighth Day) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: April 13th-15th

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  • Jean de La Fontaine died on 4/13/1695. “Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.” (Fables)
  • Sameul Beckett was born on 4/13/1906. “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” (More Pricks than Kicks; Murphy; Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Molloy; Ohio Impromptu) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: March 21st-24th

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  • Robert Southey died on 3/21/1843. “How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.” (The Fall of Robespierre; Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem; After Blenheim; Madoc)
  • Caroline Sheridan Norton was born on 3/22/1808. “We have been friends together in sunshine and shade.” (A Voice from the Factories; The Undying One and Other Poems; Stuart of Dunleath)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died on 3/22/1832. “Character develops itself in the stream of life.” (The Sorrows of Young Werther; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; Faust)
  • Isabel Burton died on 3/22/1896. “Honour, not honours.” (The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land: from my private journal; Arabia, Egypt, India: a narrative of travel; The Life of Captain Sir Richd F. Burton)
  • Louis L’Amour was born on 3/22/1908. “Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.” (Silver Canyon; Shalako; The Ferguson Rifle; The Walking Drum)
  • Stendhal died on 3/23/1842. “This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.” (Armance; Lucien Leuwen; The Charterhouse of Parma; Vanina Vanini)
  • William Morris was born on 3/24/1834. “I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.” (The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs; A Dream of John Ball; News from Nowhere (or, An Epoch of Rest); The Water of the Wondrous Isles)
  • Olive Schreiner was born on 3/24/1855. “No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.” (The Story of an African Farm; Stories, Dreams and Allegories; Woman and Labour)
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died on 3/24/1882. “Music is the universal language of mankind.” (Hyperion, A Romance; Kavanagh; The Song of Hiawatha)
  • Jules Verne died on 3/24/1905. “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.” (Journey to the Center of the Earth; From the Earth to the Moon; Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; Around the World in Eighty Days; Around the Moon; Off on a Comet)
  • John Millington Synge died on 3/24/1909. “In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.” (In the Shadow of the Glen; Riders to the Sea; The Playboy of the Western World; Deidre of the Sorrows)
Robert Southey, Project Gutenberg
Isabel Burton, 1861
Caroline Sheridan Norton
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Georg Oswald May, 1779
Stendhal’s grave in Montmartre, Paris
William Morris, Self-portrait, 1856
Olive Schreiner, 1889
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868
Jules Verne
John Millington Synge

The Dead Writers Round-Up: March 4th-8th

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  • William Carlos Williams died on 3/4/1963. “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” (Poems; Spring and All; Journey to Love; Paterson)
  • Frank Norris was born on 3/5/1870. “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth.” (McTeague; The Octopus: A Story of California; The Pit)
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on 3/6/1806. “Who so loves believes the impossible.” (Casa Guidi Windows; Aurora Leigh; Last Poems)
  • Artemus Ward died on 3/6/1867. “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so.” (Artemus Ward His Panorama; Artemus Ward in London)
  • Pearl S. Buck died on 3/6/1973. “Hunger makes a thief of any man.” (The Good Earth; Peony; The Big Wave)
  • Stevie Smith died on 3/7/1971. “All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.” (Novel on Yellow Paper; This Englishwoman; Not Waving But Drowning; Scorpion and Other Poems)
  • Kenneth Grahame was born on 3/8/1859. “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” (The Golden Age; Dream Days; The Wind in the Willows)
  • Sherwood Anderson died on 3/8/1941. “I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.” (Many Marriages; Winesburg, Ohio; The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions From American Life in Tales and Poems)
William Carlos Williams’ Passport Photo, 1921
Frank Norris
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Artemus Ward
Kenneth Grahame, circa 1910

 

The Dead Writers Roundup: February 22nd-25th

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  • James Russell Lowell was born on 2/22/1819. “Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.” (A Fable for Critics; Conversations on the Old Poets)
  • Jules Renard was born on 2/22/1864. “Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.” (Crime de village; Poil de carotte)
  • Edward Gorey was born on 2/22/1925. “To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.” (The Doubtful Guest; The Gashlycrumb Tinies; The Gilded Bat; The Broken Spoke; The Loathsome Couple)
  • Elizabeth Bowen died on 2/22/1973. “When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.” (The Last September; The House in Paris; The Heat of the Day; Eva Trout; Look At All Those Roses)
  • Samuel Pepys was born on 2/23/1633. “Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.” (The Diary of Samuel Pepys) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: February 17th-21st

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  • Jean-Baptiste Molière died on 2/17/1673. “Things are only worth what one makes them worth.” (The School for Wives; Tartuffe; The Misanthrope; Amphitryon)
  • Heinrich Heine died on 2/17/1856. “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” (The North Sea: Cycle I and II; The Town of Lucca; The Salon I)
  • Dorothy Canfield Fisher was born on 2/17/1879. “Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.” (The Bent Twig; Her Son’s Wife; Seasoned Timber)
  • Audre Lord was born on 2/18/1934. “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” (The First Cities; Coal; The Cancer Journals)
  • André Breton was born on 2/19/1896. “Words make love with one another.” (Surrealist Manifesto; A Corpse; Nadja; The Automatic Message)
  • Carson McCullers was born on 2/19/1917. “I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.” (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Reflections in a Golden Eye; The Member of the Wedding)
  • André Gide died on 2/19/1951. “To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.” (The Fruits of the Earth; The Immoralist; Strait is the Gait; Corydon)
  • Knut Hamsun died on 2/19/1952. “I can’t even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.” (Hunger; Mysteries; Pan; In Wonderland; On Overgrown Paths) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: February 10th

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  • Sir John Suckling was born on 2/10/1609. “Out upon it I have lov’d/Three whole days together;/And am like to love three more,/If it prove fair weather.” (Ballad Upon a Wedding; Aglaura)
  • Baron de Montesquieu died on 2/10/1755. “Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.” (Persian Letters; The Temple of Gnide)
  • Charles Lamb was born on 2/10/1775. “I love to lose myself in other men’s minds…Books think for me.” (Blank Verse; Tales from Shakespeare; The Adventures of Ulysses; Essays of Elia)
  • Boris Pasternak was born on 2/10/1890. “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.” (My Sister, Life; Themes and Variations; Safe Conduct; Doctor Zhivago)
  • Bertolt Brecht was born on 2/10/1898. “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” (Happy End; Saint Joan of the Stockyards; Don Juan; Trumpets and Drums; The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre)
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder died on 2/10/1957. “It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” (Little House in the Big Woods; Little House on the Prairie; On the Banks of Plum Creek)
  • Alex Haley died on 2/10/1992. “In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.” (The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Roots: The Saga of an American Family)
  • Arthur Miller died on 2/10/2005. “A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.” (All My Sons; Death of a Salesman; The Crucible; A View from the Bridge; After the Fall; Mr. Peter’s Connections; Resurrection Blues)
Sir John Suckling
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
Charles Lamb, 1798
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Alex Haley in the U.S. Coast Guard

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 8th-9th February

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  • Jules Verne was born on 2/8/1828. “Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” (A Journey to the Center of the Earth; From the Earth to the Moon; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Around the World in Eighty Days)
  • Kate Chopin was born on 2/8/1850. “A person can’t have everything in this world; and it was a little unreasonable of her to expect it.” (Bayou Folk; A Night in Acadie; The Awakening)
  • Elizabeth Bishop was born on 2/8/1911. “If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I’m sure it’s a good one-and the same goes for paintings.” (North & South; Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring; The Complete Poems)
  • Iris Murdoch died on 2/8/1999. “We can only learn to love by loving.” (Under the Net; The Bell; The Sea, The Sea; The Green Knight)
  • Amy Lowell was born on 2/9/1874. “Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.” (A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass; Sword Blades and Poppy Seed; Legends; A Critical Fable) Continue reading →