• Giovanni Boccaccio died on 12/21/1375. “People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.” (The Decameron; On Famous Women)
• Dame Rebecca West was born on 12/21/1892. “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.” (The Return of the Soldier; The Fountain Overflows; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; 1900)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald died on 12/21/1940. “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” (This Side of Paradise; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night; Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Pat Hobby Stories)
• Jean Racine was born on 12/22/1639. “I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me.” (Andromaque; Iphigenie; Phedre)
• Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on 12/22/1869. “To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven.” (Merlin; Collected Poems; The Man Who Died Twice; Tristram; Van Zorn)
• George Eliot died on 12/22/1880. “I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.” (Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Silas Marner; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda)
• Wallace Henry Thurman died on 12/22/1934. “One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences.” (Harlem; The Blacker the Berry; Infants of the Spring)
• Beatrix Potter died on 12/22/1943. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” (The Tale of Peter Rabbit; The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin; The Tale of Benjamin Bunny; The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher)
• Samuel Beckett died on 12/22/1989. “Habit is a great deadener.” (Endgame; Come and Go; A Piece of Monologue; Dream of Fair to Middling Women)
• Joe Strummer died on 12/22/2002. “When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don’t learn nothing, cause hey, it’s not your fault, it’s his fault, over there.” (Songwriter, lyricist of The Clash)
• George Crabbe was born on 12/24/1754. “Be there a will, and wisdom finds a way.” (The Village; The Borough)
• Matthew Arnold was born on 12/24/1822. “And we forget because we must and not because we will.” (Dover Beach; The Scholar-Gipsy; Culture and Anarchy)
• William Makepeace Thackeray died on 12/24/1863. “Bravery never goes out of fashion.” (The Luck of Barry Lyndon; Vanity Fair)
• Quentin Crisp was born on 12/25/1908. “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” (The Naked Civil Servant; How to Become a Virgin)

Quentin Crisp’s Signature

William Makepeace Thackeray

Matthew Arnold, from The New Student Reference Work, 1914

George Crabbe

Joe Strummer

Samuel Beckett by Reginald Gray, 1961

Wallace Henry Thurman

Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1888

Jean Racine

F. Scott Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant, from Shadowland Magazine, 1921.

Giovanni Boccaccio by Andrea del Castagno, from the cycle Famous People

Beatrix Potter, circa 1881

George Eliot

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

• John Greenleaf Whittier was born on 12/17/1807. “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, It might have been.” (Snow-bound)
• Ford Madox Ford was born on 12/17/1873. “Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.” (The Good Soldier; The Parade’s End tetralogy; The Fifth Queen trilogy)
• Dorothy L. Sayers died on 12/17/1957. “The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.” (Lord Peter Wimsey novels and short stories)
• Marguerite Yourcenar died on 12/17/1987. “When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.” (Alexis; Memoirs of Hadrian)
• Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) was born on 12/18/1870. “He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.” (The Westminster Alice; When William Came)
• Louis Untermeyer died on 12/18/1977. “She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.” (Long Feud: Selected Poems; Bygones; The Pursuit of Poetry; Moses)
• Emily Brontë died on 12/19/1848. “Honest people don’t hide their deeds.” (Wuthering Heights)
• Jean Genet was born on 12/19/1910. “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.” (The Thief’s Journal; Our Lady of the Flowers; The Balcony)
• James Hilton died on 12/20/1954. “Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren’t things to think about anymore. All that matters is value-the ultimate value of what one does.” (Knight Without Armour; Lost Horizon; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Random Harvest)
• John Steinbeck died on 12/20/1968. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” (The Red Pony; Tortilla Flat; Of Mice and Men; The Grapes of Wrath; Cannery Row; The Pearl; East of Eden)
• Denise Levertov died on 12/20/1997. “Images/split the truth/in fractions.” (The Double Image; Breathing the Water; A Door in the Hive)

John Greenleaf Whittier

Ford Madox Ford

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Emily Brontë by Branwell Brontë

Jean Genet Signature

John Steinbeck Signature

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

• 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]