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

Omeros, Derek Walcott (no commercially available poster)

Derek Walcott
b. 1-23-1930; Castries, Saint Lucia

Poet, playwright, writer and visual artist Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”.

Derek Walcott quotes ~
• “If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.”
• “Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”
• “The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island. ”
• “A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.”

Alice Walker
b. 2-9-1944; Eastonton, Georgia

The Color Purple is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by African-American author and poet Alice Walker. Walker, the daughter of sharecroppers, is also a civil rights and peace activist.

The Color Purple was challenged, but retained, in a California school district due to controversial ideas about race, religion, and sexuality.

Alice Walker quotes ~
• “Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.”
• “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.”
• “Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.”
• “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.”
• “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

Jubilee, Margaret Walker (no commercially available poster)

Margaret Walker
b. 7-6-1915; Birmingham, AL
d. 11-30-1998; Chicago, IL (breast cancer)

Margaret Walker gained national attention with the 1942 collection For My People. Her novel Jubilee, first published in 1966, was about her grandmother's life as a slave.

Lew Wallace
b. 4-10-1827; Brookville, IN
d. 2-15-1905; Crawfordsville, IN (cancer)

Lew Wallace, a lawyer, governor, Union general in the American Civil War, and statesman, is best remembered for his historical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Ben-Hur, published in 1880 and never out of print, surpassed Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin in sales in the 19th century, and was superceded by Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind in 1936.

Wallace said that he came to write Ben-Hur after a long talk with Robert G. Ingersoll who questioned how Wallace came to his faith.

Lew Wallace quotes ~
• “I know what I should love to do – to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing – one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.”
• “One is never more on trial than in the moment of excessive good fortune.”
• “Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.”

Horace Walpole
b. 9-24-1717; London, England
d. 3-2-1797

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford, was a writer, an innovator in architecture, and politician. He is known for his wittiness, having coined the term “serendipity” from the Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip is the Persian name for Sri Lanka), and referring to Mary Wollstonecraft as “a hyena in petticoats”.

FYI ~ Walpole did like comedic actress Kitty Clive and helped introduce her into aristocratic friendships.

Horace Walpole quotes ~
• “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
• “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.”
• “Oh that I were seated as high as my ambition, I'd place my naked foot on the necks of monarchs.”

Izaak Walton
b. 8-9-1593; Stafford, Staffordshire, England
d. 12-15-1682

Izaak Walton, the author and angler known as “Pater Piscatorum” or “Father of Fishers”, wrote The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, a popular classic treatise on fishing that goes beyond techniques, embracing a life that values serenity and appreciation for creation.

Izaak Walton quote ~
• “Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.”
• “Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.”

• seafood posters
• aquatic posters

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
b. 8-31-1844; Andover, MA
d. 1-28-1911; Newton Center

Author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was an advocate for social reform, temperance, and the emancipation of women including urging them to burn their corsets.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward quote ~
• “Sweetest the strain when in the song the singer has been lost.”
• “A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the
world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.”
• “It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.”
• “Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.”
• “Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?”
• “What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.”

Theodore Ward
b. 11-15-1902; Thibodeaux, LA
d. 5-8-1983

Playwright Theodore Ward is best remembered for his play Big White Fog and as a founder of the Negro Playwrights' Company with Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, among others.

Theodore Ward quote ~
• “But suddenly I found my spirit sickened as I realised the truth: 'I'm a Negro and all this beauty and majesty does not belong to me.' With a fallen heart, I acknowledged that I had nothing to boast of. I was a descendant of the slaves who had built this country, yet I was still deprived of the patriotic joy felt by those who claimed the land as their own. In my bewilderment that late afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me that we as a people were engulfed by a pack of lies, surrounded, in fact, by one big white fog through which we could see no light anywhere. Disheartened, as the sun sank behind the mountains west of the pass, I crawled back into a darkened corner of the boxcar and there I lay down, convinced that my life would be that of a 'floater', sans hope, sans purpose.”
My search for the lost voice of black America, Michael Attenborough

Mercy Otis Warren
b. 9-14-1728; Barnstable, MA
d. 10-19-1814; Plymouth

Mercy Otis Warren, the sister of patriot lawyer James Otis (1725-1783), and wife of James Warren, is known as the “Conscience of the American Revolutionary.”

Mercy Warren was a close friend of Abigail Adams and hosted political meetings in her home. In 1772 her play, The Adulateur, was published. After the war, in 1790, Mrs. Warren published a volume of poetry in her name and in 1805, she published History of the American Revolution.

Robert Penn Warren
b. 4-24-1905; Guthrie, KY
d. 9-15-1989; Vermont

Robert Penn Warren, poet, novelist, and literary critic, received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for his novel All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. He is also a MacArthur fellow and selected as the first U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

Robert Penn Warren quotes ~
• “Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”
• “The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see – it is, rather, a light by which we may see – and what we see is life.”
• “For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”
• “A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.”
• “I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism – that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.”

Booker T. Washington
b. April 5, 185?; VA
d. 11-15-1915

Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, became the foremost black educator and leader of his time. His 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, was a best-seller.

Booker T. Washington quotes ~
• “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
• “If you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams.”
• “We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

• more Booker T. Washington posters

Evelyn Waugh
b. 10-28-1903; London, England
d. 4-10-1966; Somerset, UK

Writer Evelyn Waugh is best remembered for his dark humor and satire as expressed in his novels Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Evelyn Waugh quotes ~
• “In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.”
• “Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”
• “Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”
• “Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.”
• “One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.”
• “Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.”