Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints: “Di...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and scholars.

Philip K. Dick
b. 12-16-1928; Chicago, IL
d. 3-2-1982; Santa Ana, CA (stroke)

Philip K. Dick, novelist, short story writer, and essayist who spent most of his life in near poverty and using drugs, is best remembered for his contribution to the science fiction genre. Since his death nine of his stories have been adapted into films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, and in 2007 he became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.

Dick was influenced by the work of Carl Gustav Jung in “archetypes of the collective unconscious, group projection/ hallucination, synchronicities, and personality theory”.

Dick's 1977 science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly (movie poster) has a character quoting Teilhard de Chardin.

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• The Philip K. Dick Collection

Charles Dickens
b. 2-7-1812; Portsmouth, England
d. 6-9-1870; Gad's Hill Place, Higham, Kent

Many of Charles Dickens' novels, have the recurrent theme for social reform, more than likely an interest growing out his father's imprisonment for debt. As a twelve year old Charles had to work in a a blacking factory 12 hours a day, in horrid conditions. In his novels Dickens could expose business schemers and villians, and their possible reformation, ala Scrooge, influencing the attitudes of millions and creating the political will to change.

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James Dickey
b. 2-2-1923; Atlanta, Georgia
d. 1-19-1997; Columbia, SC

Poet and novelist James Dickey is most popularily known for his novel Deliverance which was made into a film.

Dickey taught at Rice University and the University of South Carolina, wrote advertising copy for a time to “make some bucks”, was the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1966 to 1968, and read his poem “The Strength of Fields” at the inauguration of Jimmy Carter in 1977.

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Emily Dickinson
b. 12-10-1830; Amherst, MA
d. 5-15-1886; MA

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• 19th Cent Authors posters

Denis Diderot
b. 10-5-1713; Langres, France
d. 7-31-1784; Paris

Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, who is best remembered as chief editor and contributor to the creation of the Encyclopédie, was also the author of Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, the dialogue Rameau's Nephew, plays, and essays. Diderot held a materialist view of the universe and rejected the Idea of Progress, seeing progress achieved through technology as ultimately unsuccessful.

Denis Diderot quotes ~
• “Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.”
• “Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”
• “Good music is very close to primitive language.”
• “In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.”
• “Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.”

Joan Didion
b. 12-5-1934; Sacramento, CA

Joan Didion is “best known as a novelist and writer of personalized, journalistic essays”.

Joan Didion quotes ~
• “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
• “To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.”
• “To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
• “Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.”
• “When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”

Franz von Dingelstedt
b. 6-30-1814; Halsdorf, Hesse-Kassel, Germany
d. 5-15-1881

Franz von Dingelstedt was a poet, dramatist and theater administrator.

Isak Dinesen
b. 4-17-1885; Rungsted, Denmark
d. 9-7-1962; Rungsted

Isak Dinesen is the pen name of author Karen Blixen best known for Out of Africa, Babette's Feast, and Seven Gothic Tales.

Isak Dinesen quotes ~
• “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
• “I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.”
• “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”
• “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
• “A great artist is never poor.”

Dinesen was familiar with the Athi Plain described by Carl Jung.