Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints, “Bu...-By...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms and homeschoolers.

Pearl S. Buck
b. 6-26-1892; West Virginia
d. 3-6-1973; Vermont

“We will eat meat that we can beg or buy, but not that which we steal. Beggars we may be but thieves we are not.” The Good Earth

Buck was the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature receipient “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
b. 5-25-1803; London, England
d. 1-18-1873; Torquay

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, was a politician, poet, playwright, and prolific novelist who is barely remembered today though phrases he coined like “the great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar” (The Coming Race, 1871), “the pen is mightier than the sword” (Richelieu, Or the Conspiracy, 1839), and the famous opening line “It was a dark and stormy night” (opening line of Paul Clifford, 1830) are burned into our collective memory.

• Collected Works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
b. 10-22-1870; Russia
d. 11-8-1953; Paris (heart attack)

Ivan Bunin was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing”.

• Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin

John Bunyan
b. 11-28-1628; England
d. 8-31-1688

Christian writer and preacher John Bunyan is famous for writing The Pilgrim's Progress, arguably one of the most widely known allegories ever written.

John Bunyan quotes -
• “When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart.”
• “Sin is the dare of God's justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeer of His patience, the slight of His power, and the contempt of His love.”
• “Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.”
• “The more he cast away the more he had.”

Frank Gelett Burgess
b. 1-30-1866; Boston
d. 9-18-1951

Artist, art critic, poet, author, and humorist Gelett Burgess penned these famous words-
“I never saw a Purple Cow;
I never hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One”

After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Burgess went of California and became an instructor in topographical drawing at Berkeley, cofounded The Lark magazine where The Purple Cow was published, founded Le Petit Journal des Refusées which was composed entirely of material rejected by other publishers and printed on scraps of wallpaper, and wrote a series of children's books about child-like creatures he called “The Goops”.

Burgess also was the first American to write about cubist art in the U.S., interviewing Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque; AND it seems he is attributed with coining the word “blurb”, meaning a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes, in 1907.

Frances Hodgson Burnett
b. 11-24-1849; Manchester, England
d. 10-29-1924

Frances Hodgson Burnett, author and playwright, is best remembered for her children's stories that include The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

• Simile - Literary Techniques poster

Fanny (Frances) Burney
b. 6-13-1752; England
d. 1-6-1840

Fanny Burney, Jane Austen's favorite author, exposed the image-conscious and social snobbery of urban England with a sense of the comic. Burney was also friends with art patroness and diarist Hester Thrale who fell out of Burney's favor when Hester “remarried beneath” her station.

FYI, Burney was also known as Mme d'Arblay.

• Evelina

Robert Burns
b. 1-25-1759; Scotland
d. 7-21-1796 (tuberculosis)

Robert Burns, the Scottish National Poet, is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism.

Robert Burns quotes ~
“O my Luve's like a red, red rose, /That’s newly sprung in June: /
O my Luve's like the melodie / That’s sweetly play'd in tune.

“Gin a body meet a body
Comin' thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?” Comin' Through the Rye

• The Complete Works of Robert Burns

FYI - Burns' Comin' Through the Rye was title inspiration for J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Also take a look at Thomas Moore, the Bard of Ireland.

Edgar Rice Burroughs
b. 9-1-1875; Chicago, IL
d. 3-19-1950; Encino, CA

Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan, one of the most recognizable character in literature, and numerous science fiction and fantasy stories. FYI - The name “Tarzan” in copyrighted, and the community of Tarzana, CA is named after the character.

Edgar Rice Burroughs quote ~
• “...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

• Tarzan and the Ant Men (book)

John Burroughs
b. 4-3-1837; Roxbury, New York
d. 3-29-1921; near Kingsville, OH

Naturalist John Burroughs was intrumental in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement through his ability to “record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.”

Born on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs spent his youth working on the farm and observing nature. He taught school in order to pay for advanced education that introduced him to the work of Emerson and Thoreau.

In his long life Burroughs was friends with Jay Gould, a hometown classmate, the poet Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison.

• John Burroughs Association

William S. Burroughs
b. 2-5-1914; Missouri
d. 8-2-1997; Lawrence, Kansas

Novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer William S. Burroughs was a major figure of the Beat Generation and considered to be “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century.”

William S. Burroughs quotes ~
• “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”
• “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
• “Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”
• “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.”
• “Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”

• Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Samuel Butler
b. 12-5-1835; England
d. 6-18-1902

Victorian author, theologian and philosopher Samuel Butler's most famous works are the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh. Butler sought “more general principles of growth, development and purpose: ‘What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and more than that – with the fulfillment of the universe . . .’”.

Butler compared human evolution to machine evolution, prophesizing, half jokingly, that machines would eventually replace man in the supremacy of the earth: “In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.”

FYI - Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on his novel Brave New World and refers to Erewhon in Island. Environmentalist Paul Hawken called one of his first businesses Erewhon.

There is also a 17th century English poet by the name Samuel Butler (1612-1680), who is the author of Hudibras, a satirical mock heroic narrative poem that contains the line “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Lord Byron
b. 1-22-1788; London, England
d. 4-19-1824; Greece (malaria)

• The Love Poems of Lord Byron: A Romantic's Passion, George Gordon Byron
• poetry forms posters
• Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, author of the first computer program