Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints: “Da...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and scholars.

Roald Dahl
b. 9-13-1916; Llandaff, Wales
d. 11-23-1990; Oxford

Some of Roald Dahl's most popular book are The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The BFG.

He was also a WWII flying ace and intelligence officer.

Roald Dahl quote ~
• “So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install, A lovely bookshelf on the wall.” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

• Roald Dahl at Amazon.com

Clemence Dane, née Winifred Aston
b. 2-21-1888; Blackheath, England
d. 3-28-1965; London

Clemence Dane was a novelist, playwright, and screen writer, winning an Academy Award for Vacation from Marriage (Perfect Strangers).

Poster text: Miss Clemence Dane, who is having a new play on the London stage, and to whom we shall be grateful for a new novel, when she can find time to write it.

• Clemence Dane at Amazon.com

Dante
b. 6-1-1265; Florence, Italy
d. 9-13/14-1321; Ravenna (malaria)

Dante Alighieri, commonly known by his first name, was a Middle Ages poet best remembered for his epic allegorical poem, “The Divine Comedy”.

In the poem, considered one of the greatest works in world literature, Dante describes his travels through Hell (see the River Styx), Purgatory, and Heaven as an allegory of the soul's journey towards God. Dante drew especially of the medieval Christian theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Dante quotes ~
• “Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
• “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
• “Nature is the art of God.”
• “Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.”

• Divine Comedy illustration
• Dante death mask
• Poetry Forms Poster - Epic

Rubén Darío
b. 1-18-1867; Metapa (today Ciudad Dario), Nicaragua
d. 2-6-1916; Leon, Nicaragua

Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo (modernism) that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Darío was widely travelled in Central and South America, and Europe.

Rubén Darío quotes ~
• “Sweet as sweetest Grecian honey will my song be when I sing, O Beloved, in the season of the Spring!”

• Ruben Dario at Amazon.com
• Latino Posters

Charles Darwin
b. 2-12-1809; Mount House, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
d. 4-19-1882; Down House, Downe, Kent

Poster Text: "It is not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin, the first evolutionary biologist, became a household name with the publication of his Origin of the Species in 1859. In it he reported the evidence je had gathered and proposed a viable mechanism for evolution, natural selection. His theory basically stated that life on earth results from billions of years of adaptations to changing environments.

• more Charles Darwin posters
• more Heroes of Science & Technology posters

Robertson Davies
b. 6-7-1913; Thamesville, Ontario, Canada
d. 12-2-1995; Orangeville, Ont

Author, journalist, and professor Robertson Davies is best known for his The Deptford Trilogy, three related novels drawing on Jungian psychology and Davies' love of myth and magic.

Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (no commerically avaiable poster)

Frank Marshall Davis
b. 12-31-1905; Arkansas City, KS
d. 7-28-1987; Honolulu, HI

Frank Marshall Davis, a central figure in the black press, worked as a reporter and editor for the Atlanta World, the Associated Negro Press, the Chicago Star, and the Honolulu Record.

Richard Dawkins
b. 3-26-1941; Nairobi, Kenya

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, ethologist (studies animal behavior), author and advocate of Charles Darwin. He has taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.

Dawkins introduced the term “meme”, an “idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Genes transmit biological information.

Richard Dawkins quotes ~
• “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied without understanding the world.” (see Voices of Reason poster)
• “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
• “After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings.”