Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints: “Cab...-Cap...-”
for literature & language arts classrooms, homeschoolers, and scholars.

George Washington Cable
b. 10-12-1844; New Orleans, LA
d. 1-31-1925; St. Petersburg, FL

Novelist George Washington Cable is notable for the realism in portraying Creole life in his native Louisiana. Cable's fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.

Cable also became friends with Mark Twain and they did speaking tours together.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca
b. 1-17-1600; Madrid, Spain
d. 5-25-1681

Pedro Calderon de la Barca was a writer, poet and dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age which coincided with the political rise and decline of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca quotes ~
• “One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it.”
• “What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”
• “Love that is not madness is not love.”
• “Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.”

• Life is a Dream, Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Erskine Caldwell
b. 12-17-1903; Coweta Co., Georgia
d. 4-11-1987; Ashland, Oregon (lung cancer)

Erskine Caldwell, who wrote about the social problems of the South, is one of the best-selling fiction authors. His most remembered, and at times banned, novels are Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933). He and photographer Margaret Bourke-White were married 1939-1942; they collaborated on the photo documentary about the South, You Have Seen Their Faces.

Erskine Caldwell quote ~
• “I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.”

Luís de Camões
b. c 1524; Lisbon, Portugal
d. 6-10-1580; Lisbon

Luís de Camões is considered Portugal's greatest poet and has been compared to Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Vondel.

Camoes, who lost an eye in a battle with the Moors, wrote his epic poem Os Lusíadas (“The Lusiads”) while serving in Macau, saving the manuscript during a shipwreck on the return voyage to Portugal. Much of the Lusiadas celebrates explorers like Vasco da Gama.

Portugal's national day is the same as his death.

FYI - Camões was the first major European artist to cross the equator.

Joseph Campbell
b. 3-26-1904; White Plains, NY
d. 10-30-1987; NYC

Joseph Campbell was a educator, author and public lecturer who brought his expertise in comparative mythology and religion to the public through series of interviews with Bill Moyers called The Power of Myth, and his role in inspiring film director George Lucas in the development of the Star War movies.

Campbell also met Carl Jung who said to him, “Aum is the sound the nature makes when it is in harmony with itself.”

Joseph Campbell quotes ~
• “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”
• “I don't have to have faith, I have experience.”
• “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
• “I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.”
• “Love is a friendship set to music.”
• “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”
• “Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
• “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”
• “God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.”
• “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”
• “Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.”
• “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
• “We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”

Albert Camus
b. 11-7-1913; Dréan, El Taref, Algeria
d. 1-4-1960; France (car accident)

Albert Camus was a philosopher, novelist, and playwright, noted for his thinking on “the Absurb” or the philosophy that it is humanly impossible to find meaning where none exists. He was a member of the French Resistence in WW II, and was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”.

Albert Camus quotes ~
• “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
• “After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.”
• “All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.”
• “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.”

• The Cambridge Companion to Camus

Elias Canetti
b. 7-25-1905; Ruse, Bulgaria
d. 8-14-1994; Zurich, Switzerland

Elias Canetti was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature “for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power”. His work includes a tetralogy of autobiographical memoirs of his childhood and of pre-Anschluss Vienna (Die Gerettete Zunge; Die Fackel im Ohr; Das Augenspiel; and Das Geheimherz der Uhr: Aufzeichnungen), the modernist novel Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung), and for Crowds and Power, a “study of crowd behaviour as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations”.

Elias Canetti quotes ~
• “The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.”
• “All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.”
• “The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
• “Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.”
• “The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.”
• “Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.”
• “It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.”
• “One should use praise to recognize what one is not.”

Truman Capote
b. 9-30-1924; Louisiana, raised in Monroeville, AL
d. 8-25-1984; Los Angeles, CA (liver cancer)

Truman Capote's, who began writing seriously at age 11, is best remembered for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965). He was childhood friends with Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, serving as inspiration for the character ‘Dill.’

Capote also had a long struggle with alcohol and drug addiction.

Truman Capote quotes ~
• “My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.”
• “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.”
• “I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.”
• “A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.”
• “Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.”

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Capote DVD
• Breakfast at Tiffany's