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

John Cheever
b. 5-27-1912; Quincy, MA
d. 6-18-1982; Ossining, NY

John Cheever was a novelist and short story writer sometimes called the “Chekhov of the suburbs”, with his fictions set in the suburban areas of New York City, the East coast, and Rome. His short stories were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.

Cheever also had a long struggle with alcoholism.

John Cheever quotes ~
• “Art is the triumph over chaos.”
• “I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.”
• “Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”
• “The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.”

Anton Chekhov
b. 1-29-1850; Taganrog, Russia
d. 7-2-1904; Badenweiler, German Empire (tuberculosis)

Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, best remembered for his plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, was also a medical doctor.

• The Portable Chekhov, Anton Chekhov

Chekhov quotes ~
• “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.”
• “There is nothing new in art except talent.”
• “We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.”
• “The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.”

André Chénier
b. 10-30-1762; Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
d. 7-25-1794; Paris

Poet André Chénier, whose life was memorialized in an opera by Umberto Giordano, was guillotined for alleged “crimes against the state” near the end of the Reign of Terror.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
b. 5-29-1874; London, England
d. 6-14-1936

The Innocence of Father Brown is G.K. Chesterton's first mystery about the unassuming little priest who solves crimes by imagining himself inside the mind and soul of criminals.

Chesterton, in collaboration with Hilaire Belloc, developed distributivism, a third-way economic philosophy applying the principles of Catholic Social Teaching ensure that most people will become owners of productive property.

G. K. Chesterton quotes ~
• “Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”
• “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”
• “Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.”
• “None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.”
• “Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.”
• “I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.”
• “One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.”
• “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
• “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”

• Peace & Justice Education Posters

Mary Chestnut's Diary

Mary Boykin Chestnut, née Miller
b. 3-31-1823; near Stateburg, SC
d. 11-22-1886

Mary Chestnut is remembered as a diarist of the United States Civil War. Her perspective was from the upper-class Southern planter society.

She published her diary in 1905, new versions were published as papers were discovered. C. Vann Woodward's Mary Chestnut's Civil War won the Pulitizer Prize for History in 1982.

Mary Chestnut at Documenting of the American South

Charles W. Chesnutt Stories, Novels and Essays

Charles W. Chesnutt
b. 6-20-1858; Cleveland, OH
d. 11-15-1932 (heart attack)

Novelist and short-story writer Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his pioneering use of African-American folklore and candid exploration of racial identity.

Chestnutt was the son of free people of color (his paternal grandfather was a white slaveholder) and he could have “passed for white” by appearance but chose not to.

The NAACP awarded the Spingarn Medal to Chestnutt in 1928.

Lydia Maria Child, née Francis
b. 2-11-1802; Medford, MA
d. 10-20-1880; Wayland, MA

Novelist, journalist, and teacher Lydia Maria Child was an abolitionist, women's rights and Indian rights activist, and opponent of American expansionism.

Child, who wrote anti-slavery fiction, helped author Harriet Jacobs with her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and was associated with William Lloyd Garrison. Her most remembered work is Over the River and Through the Woods is associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.

Lydia Maria Child quotes ~
• “It is my mission to help in the breaking down of classes, and to make all men feel as if they were brethren of the same family, sharing the same rights, the same capabilities, and the same responsibilities. While my hand can hold a pen, I will use it to this end; and while my brain can earn a dollar, I will devote it to this end.”
• “A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.”
• “The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.”
• “But men never violate the laws of God without suffering the consequences, sooner or later.”
• “Reverence is the highest quality of man's nature; and that individual, or nation, which has it slightly developed, is so far unfortunate. It is a strong spiritual instinct, and seeks to form channels for itself where none exists; thus Americans, in the dearth of other objects to worship, fall to worshiping themselves.
• “The cure for all ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word ‘love.’ It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life.”
• “Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.”
• “Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.”
• “Over the river and through the wood/To grandfather's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh/Through the white and drifted snow.” ~ Thanksgiving Day, 1845
• “Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.”