Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints, “A”, pg 1/14
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, homeschoolers, and literature scholars.

Edwin Abbott
b. 12-20-1838; England
d. 10-12-1926

Edwin Abbott, a teacher and author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is a math satire and religious allegory of a two dimensional world where the square narrator guides readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. Isaac Asimov said in the Foreword that Flatland is “The best introduction one can find into the manner of perceiving dimensions.”

Edwin Abbott quote -
• “Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows - only hard with luminous edges - and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.”

• more Flatland book cover print
• more computer posters

Chinua Achebe
b. 11-16-1930; Nigeria

Nigerian author, poet and critic Chinua Achebe is best known for his novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God.

Achebe is currently a professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, New York.

Chinua Achebe quotes -
• “People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”
• “The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; It is this.”
• “When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”

• Things Fall Apart book cover print

Joseph Addison
b. 5-1-1672; England
d. 6-17-1719

Joseph Addison was a poet and essayist.

Joseph Addison quotes -
• “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
• “A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.”
• “Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.”

• Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays by Joseph Addison

Aeschylus
b. c. 525 BC, Greece
d. c. 456 BC

Aeschylus is often recognized as the father of tragedy, the earliest of the three Greek tragedians whose plays survive (along with Sophocles and Euripdes). His inspiration to create plays came from Dionysus in a dream. Aeschylus also was a soldier in the Battle of Marathon against Persian King Darius.

• The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Eumenides

Edward Albee
b. 3-12-1928; Washington, DC

Among playwright Edward Albee's best known plays are Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Zoo Story. Albee is associated with the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ where life is seen as inherently without meaning.

• Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958-1965

Anacreon
570 BC - 488 BC; Teos, Ionia, Ancient Greece

Anacreon was a lyric poet who wrote drinking songs and hymns.

An 18th century gentlemen's society of amateur musicians named their club the Anacreontic Society; the tune of their official song is familiar as the Star-Spangled Banner.

• The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition

Maxwell Anderson
b. 12-15-1888; Pennsylvania
d. 2-28-1959; Stamford, CT

Maxwell Anderson, a playwright, author, poet, journalist and lyricist, was brought up in Jamestown, North Dakota. Many of Anderson's plays focused on liberty and justice; he was fired from several positions (once as a high school teacher in ND for making pacifist statements).

Maxwell Anderson quotes
• “The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.”
• “If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.”

• Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958

Sherwood Anderson
b. 9-13-1878; Camden, OH
d. 3-8-1941; Panama

Sherwood Anderson was a short story writer and novelist. His most notable work is his collection of short stories entitled Winesburg, Ohio about a fictional small town and the less than simple lives of its inhabitants.

Sherwood Anderson quotes
• “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.”
• “I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.”

Guillaume Apollinaire
b. 8-26-1880; Rome
d. 11-9-1918; France (Spanish Flu Pandemic victim)

Apollinaire, poet and literary critic, is credited with coining the word “surrealism”.

His Calligrammes, which were published shortly after his death, “are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.”– Guillaume Apollinaire

Apollinaire quotes
• “Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
• “Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.”
• “A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.”

• Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-16), Apollinaire
• WWI posters

Lucius Apuleius of Madaura
b. c. 123 AD, Africa
d. 180 AD

Lucius Apuleius of Madaura was a writer and philospher born in North Africa. His The Golden Ass tells of the adventures of an aristocrat, Lucius, whose enthusiasm for magic, and lack of skill as a magician, causes his transformation into an ass. As a beast of burden Lucius is privy to seeing the world from another point of view. Shakespeare used elements of Apuleius' The Golden Ass in “A Midsummer Night's Dream”.

Aristophanes
b. ca. 446 BCE; Greece
d. ca. 386 BCE

The playwright Artistophanes is known as the “Father of Comedy”. In his well known play Lysistrata (c.411 BC), the title character and her followers refrain from intimate relations with their husbands until the opposing armies declare peace.

• Aristophanes: The Complete Plays

Matthew Arnold
b. 12-24-1822; England
d. 4-15-1888

Poet and essayist Matthew Arnold is known as a “sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.” Arnold is also often called the third great Victorian poet, after Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning.

Before he was elected to Professor of Poetry at Oxford he supported his family as an inspector of Nonconformist schools

• Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

Isaac Asimov
b. 1-2-1920; Russia
d. 4-6-1992; NYC

Isaac Asimov, considered a master of the science fiction genre, was also a biochemist. His most famous works are the Foundation Series, the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series.

Asimov was also VP of Mensa International and The American Humanist Association.

• I, Robot poster
• Asimov's Chronology of the World

W. H. Auden
b. 2-21-1907; England
d. 9-29-1973; Vienna

The central themes of W. H. Auden's poetry are “love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.”

Apollinaire quotes
• “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
• “Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”
• “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”

• Voice of the Poet: W.H. Auden

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
b. c. 1550; Peru
d. after 1616

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, also known as Guaman Poma or Human Poma, was the son of an indigenous noble Peruvian. He served as a translator and wrote and illustrated the 1200 page The First New Chronicle and Good Government between 1600 and 1615, addressed to King Philip III.