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

R. D. Blackmore
b. 6-7-1825; Longworth, Berkshire, England
d. 1-20-1900

Richard Doddridge Blackmore, one of the most famous authors of his time, is now remembered for his 1869 romance novel Lorna Doone. He was also an early environmentalist, choosing to cultivate fruit on his small market garden and fighting the encroaching railways.

William Blake
b. 11-28-1757; London, England
d. 8-12-1827

William Blake, poet, painter, and engraver, saw the disciplines of literature and art as “companions in a unified spiritual endeavors”.

Blake, who saw visions of angels as a child and God's head “put into a window” as an adult, a vision that “set (him) ascreaming”, was one of the earliest and greatest figures of Romanticism.

• more William Blake posters

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
(née von Hahn)
b. 7-31-1831; Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine
d. 5-8-1891; London, England

Russian mystic and author Madame Blavatsky was the founder of the theosophical (“divine wisdom”) movement bringing together spiritual aspects of Eastern and Western religious beliefs. Through the use of spiritual practices, theosophy promotes the unity of all spirit and matter with the universal deity.

• The Secret Doctrine: the Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy: Index to Volumes 1 and 2

Ann Eliza Bleecker
(née Schuyler)
b. October, 1752; NYC, Province of New York
d. 11-23-1783; Albany

Ann Eliza Schuyler was born into the privilege and wealth of American Dutch aristocracy. Her ability for poetry and writing were recognized early and she was encouraged to recite her poems. She married a former lawyer and gentleman farmer, John Bleecker (1745-1795), who also supported what he called “her genius”.

The Bleecker's lives were interrupted by the American Revolution - in 1777 the British troops under John Burgoyne lead John Bleecker to join the New York militia and Ann Eliza to flee their home north of Albany with their two young daughters.

The war took a huge personal toll on Eliza's family, (mother, sister, youngest daughter died, and a miscarriage) and she died at age 31.

Ann Eliza Bleecker's work was published posthumously by her surviving daugher Margaretta, also a writer.

Judy Blume, née Sussman
b. 2-12-1938; Elizabeth, New Jersey

Author Judy Blume is known for her novels for children and young adults that address controversial subjects. She has won numerous awards and been censored extensively.

Judy Blume quotes ~
• “Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.”
• “Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”
• “Fear is often disguised as moral outrage.”

Edmund Blunden
b. 11-1-1896; London, England
d. 1-20-1974; Long Melford, Suffolk

Edmund Blunden wrote in both poetry and prose of his experiences in World War I. He is one of the 16 Great War poets commemorated in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, and a professor of poetry at Oxford.

Edmund Blunden quote ~
• “Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags.”
~ 1916 Seen from 1921

Nellie Bly, née Elizabeth Jane Cochran
b. 5-5-1864; Cochrans Mills, Pennsylvania
d. 1-27-1922; New York, New York

Nellie Bly was the pen name chosen by Elizabeth Cochran(e), a pioneering woman journalist. She is best known for exposing the degrading conditions of the Bellevew Hospital insane asylum by spending ten days there as an inmate, and for her 1889 record breaking trek around the world, ala Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg, in 72 days. She also became an industrialist, patenting various containers such as milk cans and boilers.

Nelly Bly quotes ~
• “It is only after one is in trouble that one realies how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.”
• “What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; but the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist with the body, was missing.”

Robert Bly
b. 12-23-1926; Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota

Robert Bly is a poet and author who is considered a leader in the mythopoetic Men's Movement.

Robert Bly quotes ~
• “I know a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty than they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.”
• “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.”

Edward Wilmot Blyden
b. 8-3-1832; Saint Thomas, US Virgin Isl
d. 2-7-1912; Freetown, Sierra Leone

Edward Wilmot Blyden, an educator, writer, diplomat, and politician in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is regarded as the “father of Pan-Africanism”. His major work, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), pushed forward the idea that “Islam has a much more unifying and fulfilling effect..., an idea that would play a major role in the 20th-century revival of Islam” among African-Americans.