“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”-Willa Cather (born on 12/7/1873)
Willa Cather, 1912
“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.”-Thornton Wilder (died on 12/7/1975)
Thornton Wilder’s very serious looking Yale graduation photo, 1920
“Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their head, The wind is passing by.”-Christina Rossetti (born on 12/5/1830)
Claude Monet (died on 12/5/1926): Three Trees in Grey Weather, 1891
Robert Louis Stevenson died on 3 December 1894. He was forty-four years old. Here he is, looking elegant in a John Singer Sargent portrait…
Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent, 1887
He was as dashing as the best of them…
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879
His spirited wife, Fanny, also excelled at living life to the fullest …
Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne Stevenson
“So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”-Robert Louis Stevenson
Rex Stout Quote
Rex Todhunter Stout was born on 1 December 1886. He gave the world that singular detective, Nero Wolfe (and his unremittingly charming factotum Archie Goodwin!), writing dozens of excellent genre novels and short stories during a four decade period. Stout’s version of New York City is one of the best (fictionalized) settings in all of literature. Here he is, mixing patterns and still looking casually dapper in his eighty-seventh year…
Rex Stout by Jill Krementz, 1973
“To say that a man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man’s decisions are based on his rational process. That I don’t believe at all.”-Rex Stout
Oscar Wilde died on 30 November 1900. He was 46 years old.
Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”-Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”-Oscar Wilde
Eugene O’Neill died on 27 November 1953. He was sixty-five. Here he is, as a wee laddie…
Eugene O’Neill as a Child
Too adorable!
“Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.”
Reading Suggestions: Bound East for Cardiff; The Long Voyage Home; Beyond the Horizon; Anna Christie; Desire Under the Elms; Strange Interlude; Mourning Becomes Electra; Ah, Wilderness!; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey Into Night; A Moon for the Misbegotten
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Portrait of Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866
REASON: When snow started falling today, my mind immediately turned to Christina Rossetti. Her words, no matter how passionate, are of the winter.
“And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.”
If you missed My Top Six Cold Weather Writers, go here.
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”-F. Scott Fitzgerald
George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819.
George Eliot
George Eliot was rebellious in ways that actually meant something. She had guts, too, and a wide talent.
“The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.”-George Eliot
Novels: Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Silas Marner; Romola; Felix Holt, the Radical; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda
A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 