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

Frank Gelett Burgess
b. 1-30-1866; Boston, Massachusetts
d. 9-18-1951

Artist, art critic, poet, author, and humorist Gelett Burgess penned these famous words-
“I never saw a Purple Cow;
I never hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One”

After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Burgess went of California and became an instructor in topographical drawing at Berkeley, cofounded The Lark magazine where The Purple Cow was published, founded Le Petit Journal des Refusées which was composed entirely of material rejected by other publishers and printed on scraps of wallpaper, and wrote a series of children's books about child-like creatures he called “The Goops”.

Burgess also was the first American to write about cubist art in the U.S., interviewing Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque; AND it seems he is attributed with coining the word “blurb”, meaning a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes, in 1907.

Burgess was a member of the Bohemian Club with the likes of Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, John Muir, and Frank Norris.

Frances Hodgson Burnett
b. 11-24-1849; Manchester, England
d. 10-29-1924; Long Island, NY

Frances Hodgson Burnett, author and playwright, is best remembered for her children's stories that include The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Frances Hodgson Burnett quotes ~
• “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
• “As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive.”
• “Perhaps to be able to learn things quickly isn't everything. To be kind is worth a great deal to other people... Lots of clever people have done harm and have been wicked.”
• “She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of and what you do.”

• Simile - Literary Techniques poster

Fanny (Frances) Burney
b. 6-13-1752; Lynn Regis, England
d. 1-6-1840; Bath

Fanny Burney, Jane Austen's favorite author, exposed the image-conscious and social snobbery of urban England with a sense of the comic. Burney was also friends with art patroness and diarist Hester Thrale who fell out of Burney's favor when Hester “remarried beneath” her station.

FYI, Burney was also known as Mme d'Arblay.

• Evelina

Robert Burns
b. 1-25-1759; Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland
d. 7-21-1796 (tuberculosis)

Robert Burns, the Scottish National Poet, is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism.

Robert Burns quotes ~
“O my Luve's like a red, red rose, /That’s newly sprung in June: /
O my Luve's like the melodie / That’s sweetly play'd in tune.

• “When chill November's surly blast make fields and forest bare.”

“Gin a body meet a body
Comin' thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?” Comin' Through the Rye

• The Complete Works of Robert Burns

FYI - Burns' Comin' Through the Rye was title inspiration for J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Also take a look at Thomas Moore, the Bard of Ireland.

Edgar Rice Burroughs
b. 9-1-1875; Chicago, IL
d. 3-19-1950; Encino, CA

Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan, one of the most recognizable character in literature, and numerous science fiction and fantasy stories. FYI - The name “Tarzan” in copyrighted, and the community of Tarzana, CA is named after the character.

Edgar Rice Burroughs quote ~
• “...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

• Tarzan and the Ant Men (book)

John Burroughs
b. 4-3-1837; Roxbury, New York
d. 3-29-1921; near Kingsville, OH

Naturalist John Burroughs was intrumental in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement through his ability to “record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.”

Born on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs spent his youth working on the farm and observing nature. He taught school in order to pay for advanced education that introduced him to the work of Emerson and Thoreau.

In his long life Burroughs was friends with Jay Gould, a hometown classmate, the poet Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison.

John Burroughs quotes ~
• “For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.”
• “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”
• “Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.”
• “Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.”
• “The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
• “The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.”
• “To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.”
• “The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.”

• John Burroughs Association

William S. Burroughs
b. 2-5-1914; St. Louis, Missouri
d. 8-2-1997; Lawrence, Kansas

Novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer William S. Burroughs was a major figure of the Beat Generation and considered to be “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century.” * see Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

William S. Burroughs quotes ~
• “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”
• “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
• “Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”
• “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.”
• “Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”

• Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Samuel Butler
b. 12-5-1835; Langar, England
d. 6-18-1902; London

Victorian author, theologian and philosopher Samuel Butler's most famous works are the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh. Butler sought “more general principles of growth, development and purpose: ‘What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and more than that – with the fulfillment of the universe . . .’”.

Butler compared human evolution to machine evolution, prophesizing, half jokingly, that machines would eventually replace man in the supremacy of the earth: “In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.”

Samuel Butler quotes ~
• “If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”
• “Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.”
• “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
• “It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.”
• “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”
• “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.”
• “Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”
• “I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.”

FYI - Aldous Huxley acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on his novel Brave New World and refers to Erewhon in Island. Environmentalist Paul Hawken called one of his first businesses Erewhon.

There is also a 17th century English poet by the name Samuel Butler (1612-1680), who is the author of Hudibras, a satirical mock heroic narrative poem that contains the line “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron
b. 1-22-1788; London, England (raised in Aberdeen)
d. 4-19-1824; Greece (malaria)

Poet Lord Byron, regarded as one of the greatest poets, was noted in life for his aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, and self-imposed exile. Lady Caroline Lamb, a spurned lover, called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.

Byron was a contemporary of poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Byron's best-known works include She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan.

FYI ~
Byron's grandfather was the explorer John “Foul Weather Jack” Byron. In the poem Don Juan, Lord Byron speaks of American frontiersman Daniel Boone.

Lord Byron quotes ~
• “A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and when it is over, anything but friends.”
• “Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.”
• “But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.”
• “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”
• “For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.”
• “I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether.”
• “If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.”
• “Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.”
• “As soon / Seek roses in December - ice in June; / Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; / Believe a woman or an epitaph, / Or any other thing that's false, before / You trust in critics.”
• “It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”
• “The English winter, ending in July / To recommence in August.”

• The Love Poems of Lord Byron: A Romantic's Passion, George Gordon Byron
• poetry forms posters
• Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, author of the first computer program