The Dead Writers Round-Up: 12th-15th May

  • Amy Lowell died on 5/12/1925. “Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.”
  • Daphne du Maurier was born on 5/13/1907. “Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid, too real.” (from Rebecca)
  • Jean Rhys died on 5/14/1979. “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
  • L. Frank Baum was born on 5/15/1856. “Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.”
  • Emily Dickinson died on 5/15/1886. “Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.”
  • Katherine Anne Porter was born on 5/15/1890. Her The Collected Stories won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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The Dead Writers Round-Up: 5th-9th May

  • Christopher Morley was born on 5/5/1890. “Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.”
  • Henry David Thoreau died on 5/6/1862. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
  • L. Frank Baum died on 5/6/1919. “I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.”
  • Robert Browning was born on 5/7/1812. “A minute’s success pays the failure of years.”
  • Gustave Flaubert died on 5/8/1880. “A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.”
  • Edmund Wilson was born on 5/8/1895. “I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.”

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

  • Van Wyck Brooks died on 5/2/1963.
Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks, 1909

Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks, 1909

“If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?”

 

  • May Sarton was born on 5/3/1912. “In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.”
  • William Inge was born on 5/3/1913. He wrote several wildly popular plays that were successfully adapted for the screen: Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop. He won the Academy Award for writing the original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass.
  • Jane Bowles died on 5/4/1973. “I am a writer and I want to write.”

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 27th April

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson died on 4/27/1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”

  • Hart Crane died on 4/27/1932.  “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”

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

  • Ellen Glasgow was born on 4/22/1873. Glasgow won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for In This Our Life. Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland starred in the film version.
  • Vladimir Nabokov was born on 4/22/1899. “A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.”
  • William Shakespeare died on 4/23/1616. “He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.”
  • William Wordsworth died on 4/23/1850. “To begin, begin.”
  • Anthony Trollope was born on 4/24/1815. “I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.”
  • Willa Cather died on 4/24/1947. “Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.”

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The Dead Writers Round-Up: 19th-21st April

  • Lord Byron died on 4/19/1824. “A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.”
  • Bram Stoker died on 4/20/1912. “I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall drive a stake through her body.”-Dracula, Chapter 15.
  • Charlotte Bronte was born on 4/21/1816. Charlotte, dying just short of her 39th birthday, outlived all five of her siblings.

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The Dead Writers Round-Up: 24th-27th January

  • Edith Wharton was born on 1/24/1862. “Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.”
  • Vicki Baum was born on 1/24/1888. Her novel, ‘Menschen im Hotel’ supplied the basis for the 1932 Hollywood film, ‘Grand Hotel’. Starring John and Lionel Barrymore, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford (along with many others), it was one of the first big budget all-star productions.
  • Robert Burns was born on 1/25/1759. “Dare to be honest and fear no labor.”
  • W. Somerset Maugham was born on 1/25/1874. “Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.”
  • Virginia Woolf was born on 1/25/1882. “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”
  • Ouida died on 1/25/1908. Her novel ‘Under Two Flags’ has been adapted for the screen 5 times, the 1936 version starring Ronald Colman and Claudette Colbert being the most famous.
  • Lewis Carroll was born on 1/27/1832. “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end. Then stop.”

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The Dead Writers Round-Up: 19th-23rd January

  • Edgar Allan Poe was born on 1/19/1809. “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
  • Robinson Jeffers died on 1/20/1962. “Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.” (Shine, Perishing Republic, 1941)
  • Lytton Strachey died on 1/21/1932. Strachey revolutionized the genre of biography, finally bringing it out of the Victorian era by infusing his profiles with wit and genuine human emotions.
  • George A. Moore died on 1/21/1933. “Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.”
  • George Orwell died on 1/21/1950. “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
  • Lord Byron was born on 1/22/1788. “Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.”
  • August Strindberg was born on 1/22/1849. Strindberg was an artistic triple-threat, engaging in painting and photography as well as the writing for which he is known. He also fancied himself an alchemist.
  • Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) was born on 1/23/1783. “A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

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

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    John Dos Passos was born on 1/14/1896. “A man’s got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.”
  • Lewis Carroll died on 1/14/1898. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” (‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’)
  • Tillie Olsen was born on 1/14/1912. “Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.”
  • Anaïs Nin died on 1/14/1977. “Good things happen to those who hustle.”
  • Jean-Baptiste Moliere was born on 1/15/1622. “A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.”
  • Earl Wilson died on 1/16/1987. “If you wouldn’t write it and sign it, don’t say it.”
  • Anne Brontë was born on 1/17/1820. Anne was the last-born of the Brontë brood and the author of 2 novels (Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).
  • Betty Smith died on 1/17/1972. “Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
  • Gregory Corso died on 1/17/2001. “The most important of the beat poets…a really true poet with an original voice.”-Nancy Peters.
  • A.A. Milne was born on 1/18/1882. The A.A. stood for Alan Alexander.
  • Rudyard Kipling died on 1/18/1936. “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 9th-13th January

Gallery

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Simone de Beauvoir was born on 1/9/1908. “Art is an attempt to integrate evil.” Katherine Mansfield died on 1/9/1923. “Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.” Countee … Continue reading