Category Archives: The Dead Writers Round-Up

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 →

Happy Birthday James Joyce, You Stylish Gent

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James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882. Although he was born too early to grace the pages of GQ…

James Joyce, circa 1918

James Joyce, circa 1918

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…he went on to have quite the literary career. You may have heard of him?

QUOTE: “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

SOME WORKS: Chamber Music; Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegan’s Wake.

A KEEPSAKE:

Handmade Vintage Cameo Pendant Necklace of James Joyce by Blings To Pay The Bills

Handmade Vintage Cameo Pendant Necklace of James Joyce by Blings To Pay The Bills. $22.48 USD

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 26th-30th December

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  • Henry Miller was born on 12/26/1891. “Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.” (Tropic of Cancer; Black Spring; Tropic of Capricorn)
  • Charles Lamb died on 12/27/1834. “Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” (Tales from Shakespeare; Essays of Elia)
  • Theodore Dreiser died on 12/28/1945. “In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.” (Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy)
  • Christina Rossetti died on 12/29/1894. “Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth.” (Goblin Market; In the Bleak Midwinter) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 21st-25th December

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  • 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]

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 17th-20th December

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  • John Greenleaf Whittier was born on 12/17/1807. “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, It might have been.” (Snow-bound)
  • Ford Madox Ford was born on 12/17/1873. “Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.” (The Good Soldier; The Parade’s End tetralogy; The Fifth Queen trilogy)
  • Dorothy L. Sayers died on 12/17/1957. “The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.” (Lord Peter Wimsey novels and short stories)
  • Marguerite Yourcenar died on 12/17/1987. “When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.” (Alexis; Memoirs of Hadrian)
  • Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) was born on 12/18/1870. “He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.” (The Westminster Alice; When William Came)
  • Louis Untermeyer died on 12/18/1977. “She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.” (Long Feud: Selected Poems; Bygones; The Pursuit of Poetry; Moses)
  • Emily Brontë died on 12/19/1848. “Honest people don’t hide their deeds.” (Wuthering Heights)
  • Jean Genet was born on 12/19/1910. “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.” (The Thief’s Journal; Our Lady of the Flowers; The Balcony)
  • James Hilton died on 12/20/1954. “Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren’t things to think about anymore. All that matters is value-the ultimate value of what one does.” (Knight Without Armour; Lost Horizon; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Random Harvest)
  • John Steinbeck died on 12/20/1968. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” (The Red Pony; Tortilla Flat; Of Mice and Men; The Grapes of Wrath; Cannery Row; The Pearl; East of Eden)
  • Denise Levertov died on 12/20/1997. “Images/split the truth/in fractions.” (The Double Image; Breathing the Water; A Door in the Hive)
John Greenleaf Whittier
Ford Madox Ford
Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Emily Brontë by Branwell Brontë
Jean Genet Signature
John Steinbeck Signature

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