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

Ina Coolbrith, née Josephina Anna Smith
b. 3-10-1841; Nauvoo, Illinois
d. 2-29-1928; Berkeley, CA

Ina Coolbrith was the first Poet Laureate of California and a librarian who inspired a young Jack London and Isadora Duncan.

As a ten year old she rode with explorer James Beckwourth through the Sierra Nevada mountain pass that bears his name, when her mother and step-father moved the family from St. Louis to Los Angeles. She was given her mother's maiden name so as not to be associated with her father and uncle's Mormon faith.

She met a young Samuel Langhorne Clemens and knew Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Gertrude Atherton; Ansel Adams photographed her.

Coolbrith's collection of books and papers were lost in the fire that consumed San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

• “...I named you ‘Noble’. That is what you were to me — noble. That was the feeling I got from you. Oh, yes, I got, also, the feeling of sorrow and suffering, but dominating them, always riding above all, was noble. No woman has so affected me to the extent you did. I was only a little lad. I knew absolutely nothing about you. Yet in all the years that have passed I have met no woman so noble as you.” ~ letter from Jack London

James Fenimore Cooper
b. 9-15-1789; Burlington, New Jersey
d. 9-14-1851; Cooperstown, NY

James Fenimore Cooper, one of the first American authors to be widely read all over the world, is best remembered for his historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, set in the Adirondack Mountains. He also wrote numerous sea-stories.

James Fenimore Cooper ~
• “Should we distrust [a] man because his manners are not our manners?” ~ The Last of the Mohicans
• “The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.” ~ The American Democrat
• “It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.” ~ The American Democrat
• “They may talk of their Jeffersons and Jacksons, but I set down Washington and Natty Bumppo as the two only really great men of my time.” Home as Found

• more 19th Century Authors posters
• James Fenimore Cooper at Amazon.com
• Adirondacks Mountains were the setting for part of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans

Corinna (Korrina)
?600-200 BC, Greece

The poet Corinna wrote “choral lyric poetry in the Boeotian dialect” for celebrations. Corinna was called one of the nine mortal muses by Antipater of Thessalonica, the others are Praxilla, Moero, Anyte, Sappho, Erinna, Telesilla, Nossis and Myrtis.

• The Penguin Book of Women Poets

Norman Cousins
b. 6-24-1915; Union City, New Jersey
d. 11-30-1990; Los Angeles

Political journalist, author, professor, and world peace activist, Norman Cousins, also did research in the biochemistry of human emotions with laughter as a key to fighting illness.

Norman Cousins quotes ~
• “A human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling. Nothing that he says, thinks or does is without consequences.”
• “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
• “Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.”
• “Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis – once that crisis can be recognized and understood.”
• “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
• “What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.”

Noël Coward
b. 12-16-1899; Teddington, London, England
d. 3-26-1973; Jamaica (heart failure)

Playwright, composer, director, actor and singer Noel Coward studied dance as a child, beginning a career that spanned six decades, in 1911. Among his plays are Private Lives, Cavalcade, and Blythe Spirit.

Noel Coward quotes ~
• “Hollywood is a place where some people lie on the beach and look up at the stars, whereas other people lie on the stars and look down at the beach.”
• “People are wrong when they say that the opera isn't what it used to be. It is what it used to be — that's what's wrong with it!”
• “Television is for appearing on, not looking at.”
• “Why am I always expected to wear a dressing-gown, smoke cigarettes in a long holder and say ‘Darling, how wonderful’?”

Hannah Cowley
b. 3-14-1743; Tiverton, Devon, England
d. 3-11-1809

Hannah Cowley's, The Belle's Stratagem: A Comedy in Five Acts, was first produced in 1780 and is considered her most famous play. It is a lighthearted comedy about manners and courtship set in the fashionable society of late-eighteenth-century London.

Hannah Cowley quote ~
• “I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!”

William Cowper
b. 11-26-1731; Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England
d. 4-25-1800; dropsy (edema)

William Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”), well known for his hymns and evangelist poetry like The Task, also wrote about the everyday English countryside happenings, like The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782). Cowper is also notable as a translator and suffering from manic depression.

William Cowper quote ~
• “GOD moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.”

James Gould Cozzens
b. 8-19-1903; Chicago, IL
d. 8-9-1978; Florida

James Gould Cozzens won the 1949 Pulitizer Prize for “Guard of Honor” and the O. Henry Award in 1936 for “Total Stranger” in The Saturday Evening Post.

James Gould Cozzens quotes ~
• “I meditate and put on a rubber tire with three bottles of beer. Most of the time I just sit picking my nose and thinking.”
• “Real rebels are rarely anything but second rate outside their rebellion; the drain of time and temper is ruinous to any other accomplishment.”
• “A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset.”

• Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader