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

Daniel Defoe
b. c. 1659-61; London, England
d. 4-24-1731

Daniel Defoe, 17th century author and journalist, was one of the first novelist, someone telling a story a prose narrative instead of the traditional verse. Defoe's novels include Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). Defoe's genre of being marooned was picked up by Johann David Wyss in Swiss Family Robinson.

Daniel Defoe quotes ~
• “And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.”
• “The best of men cannot suspend their fate: The good die early, and the bad die late.”
• “He bade me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.”
• “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”
• “All our discontents about what we want appeared to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”
• “All men would be tyrants if they could.”

• Robinson Crusoe posters

Walter de la Mare
b. 4-25-1873; Kent, England
d. 6-22-1956; Twickenham (heart disease)

Poet, short story writer and novelist Walter de la Mare, is probably best remembered for his works for children and “The Listeners”, a poetry anthology. De la Mare was also a writer of ghost and psychological horror stories.

Walter de la Mare quotes ~
• “... Children . . . are not so closely confined and bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons . . . They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision.”

• Walter de la Mare at Amazon

Martin Delany - The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States and Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (no commercially available poster)

Martin Delany
b. 5-6-1812; Charles Town, WV
d. 1-24-1885; Xenia, OH (tuberculosis)

Martin Delany, born free, learned to read and write as a child, and continued his education, both formally and informally, his entire life. He was admitted to the Harvard Medical School, though he and two other black students were dismissed because of complaints from white students (1850).

Delany worked with Frederick Douglass on The North Star and was an early proponent of emigration to Africa as a new start for freed slaves.

Delaney was the first African American field officer in the United States Army during the Civil War, serving as a surgeon in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Martin Delany quotes ~
• “Every people should be originators of their own destiny.”
• “We must make an issue, create an event, and establish a national position for ourselves: and never may expect to be respected as men and women, until we have undertaken some fearless, bold, and adventurous deeds of daring . . .”
• “If we treated everyone we meet with the same affection we bestow upon our favorite cat, they, too, would purr.”

Grazia Deledda
b. 9-27-1871; Sardinia
d. 8-15-1936

Grazia Deledda, Italian writer best known for stories of Sardinian peasantry, was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.”

Grazia Deledda quotes ~
• “After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.”
• “According to an ancient Sardinian legend, the bodies of those who are born on Christmas Eve will never dissolve into dust but are preserved until the end of time.”

• Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda

Don DeLillo (no commercially available poster)

Don DeLillo
b. 11-20-1936; NYC, NY

Don DeLillo is the author of fourteen novels, including Falling Man, Libra, and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years. (info from Amazon)

FYI ~ DeLillo's recent novel Omega Point borrows its title and some of its ideas from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.