Tag Archives: Milestones

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

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  • 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.”

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

 

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

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  • 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.”

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

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  • 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.”

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

 

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

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  • 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

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

 

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

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  • 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.”

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

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  • 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 →

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

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

 

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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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.”