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

John Donne
b. 1-21-1572; London, England
d. 3-31-1631; London

Poet, priest, and lawyer John Donne (pronounced dun) is noted for his realistic and sensual style expressed in sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons.

FYI-
• Donne's mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the great-niece of Catholic martyr Thomas More; his grandfather, John Heywood, was a playwright
• The nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer reported was inspired to use the name ‘Trinity’ for the first nuclear explosion test by Donne's Holy Sonnets.
• The title of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is from Donne's Meditation XVII
... “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ...

• The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne

Hilda Doolittle
b. 9-10-1886; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
d. 9-27-1961; Zurich, Switzerland - stroke (buried in Bethlehem, PA)

Hilda Doolittle was an expatriate poet who wrote under the byname of H.D. She is best remembered for her association with early 20th century avant-garde Imagists Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington (she was once engaged to Pound and married to Aldington). H.D. was also in analyse with Sigmund Freud.

• Collected Poems, 1912-1944 (H.D.)

John Dos Passos
b. 1-14-1896; Chicago, IL
d. 9-28-1970; Baltimore, MD

Novelist and artist John Dos Passos is considered one of the Lost Generation writers, opposing the life view of his lawyer father. In later life his politics moved to the right.

• John Dos Passos : U.S.A. : The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money

Feodor Dostoyevsky
b. 11-11-1821; Moscow, Russia
d. 2-9-1881; St. Petersburg (emphysema and epileptic seizure)

Writer, essayist and philosopher Feodor Dostoyevsky is acknowledged as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature. His father, a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, lived with his family near the hospital which was in one of the worst areas of the city. It was here that the young Dostoyevsky would listen to the stories of the patients, and where his compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented began.

Dostoyevsky's novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are explorations into the human situation of 19th-century Russia, and his Notes from Underground were called the “best overture for existentialism ever written” (Walter Kaufmann).

Feodor Dostoyevsky quotes ~
• “The soul is healed by being with children.”
• “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
• “If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.”
• “Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”
• “Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.”
• “It's life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
• “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”
• “Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”