• 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.

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  “

• This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  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.”

At ASPL, one of the refrains that you will hear echoing in the background like a parade ground tattoo is that we love dead writers. They are, after all, the reason that we came to be such insatiable reader-writers. How their very existence in a world full of untold possibilities helped us make the journey from there to here is the stuff for another story. Today, we are here to launch a new feature in their honor called, perhaps a bit too straightforwardly, The Dead Writers Round-Up. This is a glorified birth-and-death type of history for those of you interested in such niche oddities. The haphazard nature of the life and death cycle gives us some interesting juxtapositions; perhaps proving that, if viewed in just a certain way, the Fates have a sense of humor. Or that we are lit geeks to the extreme. Either way, please enjoy this first edition of The Dead Writers Round-Up.

• Max Eastman was born on 1/4/1883. “The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.”
• Albert Camus died on 1/4/1960. “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
• T.S. Eliot died on 1/4/1965. “Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.”
• Christopher Isherwood died on 1/4/1986. Isherwood wrote the novel ‘Goodbye Berlin’ (1939), which in turn was made into a Broadway play (‘I am a Camera’ by John Van Druten) before eventually being immortalized on both stage and screen as ‘Cabaret’ .
• Frances (Fanny) Burney died on 1/6/1840. Although a celebrated novelist and playwright during her own very long lifetime, today she is best known for keeping a private journal for an astonishing 70 years.
• Carl Sandburg was born on 1/6/1878. The Illinois-born poet was friends with Marilyn Monroe the last few years of her life.
• Kahlil Gibran was born on 1/6/1883. “All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.”
• Alan Watts was born on 1/6/1916. “A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
• Zora Neale Hurston was born on 1/7/1891. “It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.”
• John Berryman died on 1/7/1972. “I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.”
• Wilkie Collins was born on 1/8/1824. The Victorian novelist is best known for his immensely popular mystery novels, ‘The Woman in White’ and ‘The Moonstone’.
• Storm Jameson was born on 1/8/1891. The English writer lived to be 95.
• Paul Verlaine died on 1/8/1896. “Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town.”