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

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)
Jerome K. Jerome was born on 5/2/1859. “What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.” (Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog); Paul Kelver; The New Utopia)
Niccolo Machiavelli was born on 5/3/1469. “Politics have no relation to morals.” (The Prince; Discourses; Andria)
Thomas Hood died on 5/3/1845. “A moment’s thinking is an hour in words.” (The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer; Up the Rhine; Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany)
Dodie Smith was born on 5/3/1896. “Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.” (Autumn Crocus; Dear Octopus; I Capture the Castle; The Hundred and One Dalmatians)
May Sarton was born on 5/3/1912. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” (Encounter in April; Plant Dreaming Deep; Journal of a Solitude; The House by the Sea; The Magnificent Spinster)
Sir Osbert Sitwell died on 5/4/1969. “The artist, like the idiot, or the clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.” (Triple Fugue; Before the Bombardment; A Place of One’s Own)
Christopher Morley was born on 5/5/1890. “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life.” (Parnassus on Wheels; The Haunted Bookshop; Thunder on the Left; Seacoast of Bohemia; Kitty Foyle)
James Branch Cabell died on 5/5/1958. “Patriotism is the religion of hell.” (Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice; The Biography of Manuel)
Henry David Thoreau died on 5/6/1862. “Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.” (Sir Walter Raleigh; Herald of Freedom; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Civil Disobedience; Walden)
Bret Harte died on 5/6/1902. “Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.” (The Outcasts of Poker Flat; The Tales of the Argonauts)
Randall Jarrell was born on 5/6/1914. “A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” (Pictures from an Institution; The Woman at the Washington Zoo; The Bat-Poet; The Lost World; The Animal Family)
L. Frank Baum died on 5/6/1919. “I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.” (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Ozma of Oz; The Emerald City of Oz; The Sea Fairies; Sky Island; The Maid of Arran)
Maurice Maeterlinck died on 5/6/1949. “How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.” (Interior; The Death of Tintagiles; The Blue Bird; The Treasure of the Humble)