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

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.

Edward Albee quotes ~
• “I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.”• “Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”
• “You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.”
• “One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.”
• “Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”
• “Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.”

• Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958-1965

Louisa May Alcott
b. 11-29-1832; Germantown, PA
d. 3-6-1888; Boston

Louisa May Alcott wrote well over a dozen books, as well as many poems, stories, and essays. Her most famous book, Little Women, is a part of a series on the history of the March family (Little Men and Jo’s Boys) and like her heroine Jo March, Louisa was a tomboy.

Her success as a writer meant financial security for her family.

“I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster! It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners!”

• more Louisa May Alcott
• Children’s Authors List

Sherman Alexie series image no longer available

Sherman Alexie
b. 10-7-1966; Spokane, WA

Poster Text: “The word gone echoes all over the reservation. The reservation was gone itself, just a shell of its former self, just a fragment of the whole. But the reservation still possesses power and rage, magic and loss, joys and jealousy. The reservation tugged at the lives of its Indians... But the reservation forgave, too.” - Reservation Blues

"According to TV and the movies, Indians don't exist past 1950." says Sherman Alexie, a Spokane and Coeur d'Alene Indian. Growing up, Mr. Alexie couldn't identify with the stereotyped images that he saw of native Americans. Now Mr. Alexie is working to remove those stereotypes with is writing about modern Native Americans.

Sherman grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, the main community of the Spokane Indian Reservation. “I was a weird, nerdy little kid,” he says, and he felt isolated from the rest of the community. He spent a lot of time alone, reading. “I'd read the entire reservation library by the time I was 15,” he says. “I read everything I could get my hands on – cereal boxes, catalogues, instruction books, you name it.”

But even though books were very important to him, he almost didn't become a writer, He planned to study medicine at Washington State University, but changed his mind after he fainted three times in human anatomy class. So he enrolled in the only open class: a poetry workshop. the first assignment was to write five poems. “I went home and did it, and it hasn't stopped yet.” Those poems can be found in his first book poetry. The Business of Fancydancing, which was published in 1992. Since then, he has published a variety of works including. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfighting in Heaven – a short story collection – and the novel Reservation Blues. He also wrote the screenplay for the film Smoke Signals, which was based on one of his short stories, and which was the first feature film written, co-produced, and directed by Native Americans.

Mr. Alexie's work often focuses on the harsh realties of reservation life – including alcoholism on poverty. “I'm not in [writing] to make people happy or to make people feel good about the world.” he says. “First and foremost, I want to talk about universal conditions.” But although his writing deals with serious subjects, it's also filled with humor. “Indians are funny, the funniest people on the planet,” he says, “They have to be.”

• Native American posters

Alphonse Allais
b. 10-20-1854; Calvados, France
d. 10-28-1905

Alphonse Allais was a poet and humorist who is especially remembered for his use of the verse form known as holorhyme, i.e. made up entirely of homophonous verses, where entire lines rhyme. He also expressed his sense of humor with visual art such as a blank sheet of paper entitled First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow, and in music - nine blank measures entitles Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man.

• The World of Alphonse Allais

Isabel Allende
b. 8-2-1942; Lima, Peru

“I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.” Eva Luna

Isabel Allende was a prominent 28-year-old journalist and humorist in Chile when her uncle, Salvador Allende, was elected the first socialist president in that nation's history. When his government was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet, Allende and her family found that they were not welcome in Chile anymore, and thy moved to Venezuela. There she felt that she wanted to say something more about her homeland, but she didn't know how to do it. When she heard that her 99 year-old grandfather was dying back in Chile, she started to write him a letter. That letter grew and grew until it bacame the manuscript for her first novel, The House of the Spirits, which was published in Spanish in 1982. ...

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• South America posters

Julia Alvarez
b. 3-27-1950; New York City, NY (raised in Dominican Republic)

“Yolanda gazes at the cake... As the singing draws to a close, the cousins urge her to make a wish. She leans forward and shuts her eyes. There is so much she wants, it is hard to single out one wish. There have been too many stops on the road of the last twenty-nine years since her family left this island behind... Let this turn out to be my home, Yolanda wishes.” How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

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• more Great Contemporary Latinos