Category Archives: The Dead Writers Round-Up

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 16th-22nd September

Posted on by
4
  • Anne Bradstreet died on 9/16/1672. “Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.”
  • William Carlos Williams was born on 9/17/1883. “Life is valuable–when completed by the imagination. And then only.”
  • Upton Sinclair was born on 9/20/1878. “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
  • Stevie Smith was born on 9/20/1902. “My Muse sits forlorn/She wishes she had not been born/She sits in the cold/No word she says is ever told.”
  • Babette Deutsch was born on 9/22/1895. She graduated from Barnard College in 1917.
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart died on 9/22/1958. “Men deceive themselves; they look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child…”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 25th-28th August

Posted on by
2
  • Bret Harte was born on 8/25/1836. “A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.”
  • Truman Capote died on 8/25/1984. “A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.”
  • Zona Gale was born on 8/26/1874. “The world consists almost exclusively of people who are one sort and behave like another sort.”
  • Christopher Isherwood was born on 8/26/1904. “One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”
  • Theodore Dreiser was born on 8/27/1871. “In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.”
  • Ivy Compton-Burnett died on 8/27/1969. “People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.”
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on 8/28/1749. “Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
  • Robertson Davies was born on 8/28/1913. “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 22nd-24th August

Posted on by
4
  • Dorothy Parker was born on 8/22/1893. “Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.”
  • Kate Chopin died on 8/22/1904. “To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts-absolute gifts-which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul.”
  • Ray Bradbury was born on 8/22/1920. “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”
  • Edgar Lee Masters was born on 8/23/1869. “To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”
  • Jean Rhys was born on 8/24/1890. “A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.”
  • Malcolm Cowley was born on 8/24/1898. “Be kind and considerate with your criticism….It’s just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.”
  • Jorge Luis Borges was born on 8/24/1899. “Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 9th-12th August

Posted on by
4
  • Hermann Hesse died on 8/9/1962. “Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.”
  • Louise Bogan was born on 8/11/1897. “Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.”
  • Edith Wharton died on 8/11/1937. “Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
  • William Blake died on 8/12/1827. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart was born on 8/12/1876. “The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer’s life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”
  • Radclyffe Hall was born on 8/12/1880. “The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth.”-The Well of Loneliness
  • Helen Hunt Jackson died on 8/12/1885. “Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what’s in a name?
  • Thomas Mann died on 8/12/1955. “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

 

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 1st-3rd August

Posted on by
10
  • Herman Melville was born on 8/1/1819. “A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
  • James Baldwin was born on 8/2/1924. “Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”
  • Wallace Stevens died on 8/2/1955. “As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.”
  • Donald Ogden Stewart died on 8/2/1980. Stewart was a playwright-turned-screenwriter. He won an Academy Award for his adaptation of Philip Barry’s play, The Philadelphia Story.
  • William S. Burroughs died on 8/2/1997. “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
  • Ernie Pyle was born on 8/3/1900. “War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.”
  • Joseph Conrad died on 8/3/1924. “An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”
  • Colette died on 8/3/1954. “A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.”
  • Flannery O’Connor died on 8/3/1964. “I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I am afraid it will not be controversial.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

[All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain.]

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 18th-21st July

Posted on by
10
  • William Makepeace Thackeray was born on 7/18/1811. “A good laugh is sunshine in the house.”
  • Jane Austen died on 7/18/1817. “A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.”
  • Clifford Odets was born on 7/18/1906. “Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.”
  • Hunter S. Thompson was born on 7/18/1937. “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
  • Hart Crane was born on 7/21/1899. “Love: a burnt match skating in the urinal.”
  • Ernest Hemingway was born on 7/21/1899. “As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain.

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 6th-8th June

Posted on by
14
  • Thomas Mann was born on 6/6/1875. “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”
  • Elizabeth Bowen was born on 6/7/1899. “Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”
  • Gwendolyn Brooks was born on 6/7/1917. “Art hurts. Art urges voyages-and it is easier to stay at home.”
  • Dorothy Parker died on 6/7/1967. “I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn.”
  • E.M. Forster died on 6/7/1970. “America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.”
  • Henry Miller died on 6/7/1980. “An artist is always alone-if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”
  • Thomas Paine died on 6/8/1809. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
  • George Sand died on 6/8/1876. “Admiration and familiarity are strangers.”
  • Marguerite Yourcenar was born on 6/8/1903. “A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 2nd-4th June

Posted on by
8
  • Thomas Hardy was born on 6/2/1840. “And yet to every bad there is a worse.”
  • Barbara Pym was born on 6/2/1913. “My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.”-Excellent Women
  • George S. Kaufman died on 6/2/1961. “When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That’s the price she has to pay.”
  • Franz Kafka died on 6/3/1924. “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”
  • Allen Ginsberg was born on 6/3/1926. “America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?”-America
  • Harry Crosby was born on 6/4/1898. “When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to anyone. It is like murdering a part of them.”
  • Arna Bontemps died on 6/4/1973. “There will be better days when I am gone And healing pools where I cannot be healed”-Nocturne at Bethesda

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

 

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

Posted on by
2
  • Henrik Ibsen died on 5/23/1906. “Do not use that foreign word “ideals.” We have that excellent native word “lies.””
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 5/25/1803. “A great man is always willing to be little.”
  • Madame de La Fayette died on 5/25/1693. “Never refuse any advance of friendship, for if nine out of ten bring you nothing, one alone may repay you.”
  • Maxwell Bodenheim was born on 5/26/1892. “Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.”
  • Dashiell Hammett was born on 5/27/1894. “I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.”
  • Rachel Carson was born on 5/27/1907. “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.”

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

Posted on by
2
  • Dorothy Richardson was born on 5/17/1873. “If there was a trick, there must be a trickster.”
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne died on 5/19/1864. “The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.” Continue reading →