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.”