• Giovanni Boccaccio died on 12/21/1375. “People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.” (The Decameron; On Famous Women)
• Dame Rebecca West was born on 12/21/1892. “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.” (The Return of the Soldier; The Fountain Overflows; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; 1900)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald died on 12/21/1940. “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” (This Side of Paradise; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night; Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Pat Hobby Stories)
• Jean Racine was born on 12/22/1639. “I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me.” (Andromaque; Iphigenie; Phedre)
• Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on 12/22/1869. “To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven.” (Merlin; Collected Poems; The Man Who Died Twice; Tristram; Van Zorn)
• George Eliot died on 12/22/1880. “I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.” (Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Silas Marner; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda)
• Wallace Henry Thurman died on 12/22/1934. “One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences.” (Harlem; The Blacker the Berry; Infants of the Spring)
• Beatrix Potter died on 12/22/1943. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” (The Tale of Peter Rabbit; The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin; The Tale of Benjamin Bunny; The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher)
• Samuel Beckett died on 12/22/1989. “Habit is a great deadener.” (Endgame; Come and Go; A Piece of Monologue; Dream of Fair to Middling Women)
• Joe Strummer died on 12/22/2002. “When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don’t learn nothing, cause hey, it’s not your fault, it’s his fault, over there.” (Songwriter, lyricist of The Clash)
• George Crabbe was born on 12/24/1754. “Be there a will, and wisdom finds a way.” (The Village; The Borough)
• Matthew Arnold was born on 12/24/1822. “And we forget because we must and not because we will.” (Dover Beach; The Scholar-Gipsy; Culture and Anarchy)
• William Makepeace Thackeray died on 12/24/1863. “Bravery never goes out of fashion.” (The Luck of Barry Lyndon; Vanity Fair)
• Quentin Crisp was born on 12/25/1908. “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” (The Naked Civil Servant; How to Become a Virgin)

Quentin Crisp’s Signature

William Makepeace Thackeray

Matthew Arnold, from The New Student Reference Work, 1914

George Crabbe

Joe Strummer

Samuel Beckett by Reginald Gray, 1961

Wallace Henry Thurman

Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1888

Jean Racine

F. Scott Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant, from Shadowland Magazine, 1921.

Giovanni Boccaccio by Andrea del Castagno, from the cycle Famous People

Beatrix Potter, circa 1881

George Eliot

[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]