Category Archives: The Dead Writers Round-Up

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 11th-16th December

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  • Colley Cibber died on 12/11/1757. “You know, one had as good be out of the world, as out of the fashion.” (An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber)
  • Gustave Flaubert was born on 12/12/1821. “Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.” (Madame Bovary)
  • Robert Browning died on 12/12/1889. “Take away love and our earth is a tomb.” (Paracelsus; Sordello; Love Among the Ruins)
  • Samuel Johnson died on 12/13/1784. “Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.” (A Dictionary of the English Language; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; London)
  • Heinrich Heine was born on 12/13/1797. “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” (The North Sea; The Salon)
  • Shirley Jackson was born on 12/14/1916 (or 1919). “I delight in what I fear.” (The Haunting of Hill House)
  • Maxwell Anderson was born on 12/15/1888. “This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it.” (What Price Glory; Saturday’s Children; Both Your Houses; Winterset; Knickerbocker Holiday; Key Largo; Anne of the Thousand Days)
  • Betty Smith was born on 12/15/1896. “I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock imbedded in its flank was wonderful.” (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
  • Jane Austen was born on 12/16/1775. “There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.” (Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; Northanger Abbey; Persuasion)
  • George Santayana was born on 12/16/1863. “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” (The Sense of Beauty; The Life of Reason; The Realms of Being)
  • Sir Noël Coward was born on 12/16/1899. “I love criticism just so long as it’s unqualified praise.” (Hay Fever; Private Lives; Cavalcade; Design for Living; Tonight at 8:30; Blithe Spirit)
  • W. Somerset Maugham died on 12/16/1965. “Only a mediocre person is always at his best.” (Of Human Bondage; The Moon and Sixpence; The Painted Veil; Cakes and Ale; The Razor’s Edge)

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 7th-10th December

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  • Cicero died on 12/7/43 BC. “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” (On the Laws; Brutus; On Duties)
  • Willa Cather was born on 12/7/1873. “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” (O Pioneers!; My Antonia; The Song of the Lark; One of Ours)
  • Thornton Wilder died on 12/7/1975. “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.” (The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Our Town; The Skin of Our Teeth; The Matchmaker)
  • Robert Graves died on 12/7/1985. “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” (Good-bye to All That; The White Goddess; I, Claudius; The Greek Myths)
  • Thomas De Quincey died on 12/8/1859. “The public is a bad guesser.” (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
  • James Thurber was born on 12/8/1894. “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.” (The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities; My Life and Hard Times; My World and Welcome to It; The Male Animal (with Elliot Nugent); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)
  • John Milton was born on 12/9/1608. “A Mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell , a Hell of Heaven.” (Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained)
  • Dame Edith Sitwell died on 12/9/1964. “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” (Clowns’ Houses; Alexander Pope; I Live Under a Black Sun)
  • Emily Dickinson was born on 12/10/1830. “I’m nobody, who are you?”
  • Luigi Pirandello died on 12/10/1936. “Drama is action, sir, drama and not confounded philosophy.” (Six Characters in Search of an Author; The Rules of the Game)
  • Damon Runyon died on 12/10/1946. “I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.” (Guys and Dolls; The Damon Runyon Omnibus)
  • Mark Van Doren died on 12/10/1972. “Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.” (Spring Thunder; Winter Diary; Collected Poems 1922-1938; The Transients)

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

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

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  • Rex Stout was born on 12/1/1886. “There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.” (Nero Wolfe series)
  • James Baldwin died on 12/1/1987. “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” (Go Tell it on the Mountain; Giovanni’s Room)
  • Robertson Davies died on 12/2/1995. “Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.” (The Deptford Trilogy)
  • Joseph Conrad was born on 12/3/1857. “You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.” (Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim)
  • Robert Louis Stevenson died on 12/3/1894. “I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.” (Treasure Island; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Kidnapped; The Master of Ballantrae)
  • John Gay died on 12/4/1732. “On the choice of friends, Our good or evil name depends.” (The Beggar’s Opera; Three Hours After Marriage)
  • Thomas Carlyle was born on 12/4/1795. “No pressure, no diamonds.” (Sartor Resartus; The French Revolution: A History)
  • Samuel Butler was born on 12/4/1835. “It is tact that is golden, not silence.” (Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh)
  • Rainer Maria Rilke was born on 12/4/1875. “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” (Sonnets to Orpheus; Letters to a Young Poet)
  • Christina Rossetti was born on 12/5/1830. “Silence is more musical than any song.” (Goblin Market; In the Bleak Midwinter)
  • Alexandre Dumas Pere died on 12/5/1870. “One’s work may be finished some day, but one’s education never.” (The Count of Monte Cristo; The Three Musketeers)
  • Anthony Trollope died on 12/6/1882. “I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.” (Chronicles of Barsetshire)
  • Sir Osbert Sitwell was born on 12/6/1892. “It is music to my ears. I have always said that if I were a rich man, I would employ a professional praiser.” (Triple Fugue; Before the Bombardment; Left Hand, Right Hand)

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 29th-30th November

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  • Louisa May Alcott was born on 11/29/1832. “It takes two flints to make a fire.” (Little Women; Little Men; Jo’s Boys)
  • C.S. Lewis was born on 11/29/1898. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” (Beyond Personality; Studies in Words; The Chronicles of Narnia)
  • Madeleine L’Engle was born on 11/29/1918. “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” (A Wrinkle in Time; A Swiftly Tilting Planet)
  • Jonathan Swift was born on 11/30/1667. “May you live all the days of your life.” (Gulliver’s Travels; A Journal to Stella)
  • Mark Twain was born on 11/30/1835. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Prince and the Pauper; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)
  • Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on 11/30/1874. “There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more.” (Anne of Green Gables; Anne of Avonlea)
  • Oscar Wilde died on 11/30/1900. “A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray; Lady Windermere’s Fan; The Ballad of Reading Gaol)
  • Sir Compton Mackenzie died on 11/30/1972. “The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domestic animal.” (Whisky Galore; The Monarch of the Glen)
Louisa May Alcott
Jonathan Swift
Mark Twain
Lucy Maud Montgomery, circa 1920-1930
Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony

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

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 23rd-27th November

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  • Sir Arthur Wing Pinero died on 11/23/1934. “Where there’s tea there’s hope.” (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; The Enchanted Cottage; The Amazons)
  • Andre Malraux died on 11/23/1976. “Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” (Man’s Fate)
  • Roald Dahl died on 11/23/1990. “Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.” (James and the Giant Peach; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Matilda; The Witches; Fantastic Mr. Fox) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 21st-22nd November

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  • Voltaire was born on 11/21/1694. “I hate women because they always know where things are.” (Candide)
  • Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was born on 11/21/1863. “We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another’s success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.” (Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900; On the Art of Reading)
  • Harold Nicolson was born on 11/21/1886. “We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.” (Paul Verlaine; Swinburne; King George V; The Age of Reason (1700-1789); Byron: The Last Journey)
  • Ellen Glasgow died on 11/21/1945. “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” (Virginia; In This Our Life)
  • Robert Benchley died on 11/21/1945. “Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.” (Pluck and Luck; Inside Benchley; Benchley Beside Himself)
  • George Eliot was born on 11/22/1819. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” (Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda)
  • Andre Gide was born on 11/22/1869. “There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.” (The Fruits of the Earth; The Immoralist)
  • Jack London died on 11/22/1916. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” (The Call of the Wild; The Sea-Wolf; White Fang; The Iron Heel; The People of the Abyss)
  • Aldous Huxley died on 11/22/1963. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” (Crome Yellow; Brave New World)
  • C.S. Lewis died on 11/22/1963. “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” (Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters; The Chronicles of Narnia)
Voltaire
Robert Benchley
George Eliot
Andre Gide, 1893
Jack London, 1900
Aldous Huxley

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

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 14th-18th November

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  • Astrid Lindgren was born on 11/14/1907. “I have been very interested in labor movement. If I could have wished another life, I would have loved to be a pioneer woman in the beginning of labor movement.” (The Pippi Longstocking books)
  • Booker T. Washington died on 11/14/1915. “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” (Up from Slavery; Working With the Hands)
  • Marianne Moore was born on 11/15/1887. “If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.” (Poems; Selected Poems; The Marianne Moore Reader) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 10th-13th November

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  • Oliver Goldsmith was born on 11/10/1730. “Where wealth accumulates, men decay.” (The Vicar of Wakefield; The Deserted Village; She Stoops to Conquer)
  • Friedrich Schiller was born on 11/10/1759. “Will it, and set to work briskly.” (Ode to Joy; The Robbers; The Maid of Orleans) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 27th-31st October

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  • Enid Bagnold was born on 10/27/1889. “The pleasure of one’s effect on other people still exists in age-what’s called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.”
  • Dylan Thomas was born on 10/27/1914. “When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
  • Sylvia Plath was born on 10/27/1932. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
  • Rex Stout died on 10/27/1975. “I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.”
  • Ted Hughes died on 10/28/1998. “Most writers of verse have several different personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.”
  • James Boswell was born on 10/29/1740. “A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.”
  • Jean Giraudoux was born on 10/29/1882. “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born on 10/30/1751. “The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.”
  • Ezra Pound was born on 10/30/1885. “A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”
  • Ella Wheeler Wilcox died on 10/30/1919. “All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.”
  • Rose Macaulay died on 10/30/1958. “Love’s a disease. But curable.”
  • John Evelyn died on 10/31/1620. “Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world.”
  • John Keats was born on 10/31/1795. “A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it.”
  • Natalie Clifford Barney was born on 10/31/1876. “Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”

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

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

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  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 10/21/1772. “Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
  • Jack Kerouac died on 10/21/1969. “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
  • Kingsley Amis died on 10/22/1995. “If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” (Lucky Jim)
  • Sarah Josepha Hale was born on 10/24/1788. “There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.”
  • Denise Levertov was born on 10/24/1923. “Images/split the truth/in fractions.”
  • Geoffrey Chaucer died on 10/25/1400. “There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.”
  • Frank Norris died on 10/25/1902. “The function of the novelist…is to comment upon life as he sees it.”
  • John Berryman was born on 10/25/1914. “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”
  • Mary McCarthy died on 10/25/1989. “We are the hero of our own story.”

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