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

Mircea Eliade
b. 3-13-1907; Bucharest, Romania
b. 4-22-1986; Chicago

Mircea Eliade, best known as a historian of religion, philosopher, interpreter of religious experience, and professor, also wrote fiction.

Eliade understood religion as the manifestations of the Sacred (hierophany) and his “Eternal Return” described religious behavior as both an imitation of, and paricipation in, sacred event restoring the “mythical time of origins” evident in cross-cultural parallels.

Eliade was influenced by Rudolf Otto, worked with Carl Jung, and participated in the Eranos group.

Mircea Eliade quotes ~
• “The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”
• “The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the ‘founding of the world’: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.”
• “Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints.”
• “In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.”
• “The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany.... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.”

• Mircea Eliade at Amazon.com

George Eliot
née Mary Ann Evans
b. 11-22-1819; Arbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England
b. 12-22-1880; London

George Eliot was the pen name of Victorian author Mary Anne Evans. Her novels, known for their realism and psychological insight, were set in provincial England.

George Eliot quotes ~
• “Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”
• “Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.”
• “The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.”
• “Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.”
• “Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”
• “It's never too late to be who you might have been.”
• “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.”
• “So year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of and end towards which the functions tended.”
• “Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.”

• George Eliot at Amazon.com

T. S. Elliot, Photographic Print

T. S. Eliot
b. 9-26-1888; St. Louis, MO
d. 1-4-1965; London

Poet, playwright and literary critic Thomas Stearns Eliot is described as one of the most important English language poets of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”

• Complete Poems and Plays,: 1909-1950; T. S. Eliot
• T. S. Eliot quote ecard - “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (Little Giddings)
• Simile - Literary Terms posters
• Experiment in Depth: A Study of the Work of Jung, Eliot & Toynbee, P.W. Martin
Carl Gustav Jung, Arnold J. Toynbee

T. S. Eliot quotes ~
• “It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.”
• “Since golden October declined into sombre November / And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud.”
• “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
• “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
• “The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.”
• “April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

Harlan Ellison
b. 5-27-1934; Cleveland, OH

Award winning writer Harlan Ellison, whose primary genre is speculative fiction, has published over 1,000 short stories, novellas, screen and tele-plays, and essays.

FYI ~ A Boy and His Dog is the name of a science fiction novella by Ellison, and its 1974 film adaptation.

Harland Ellison quotes ~
• “For a brief time, I was here; and, for a brief time, I mattered.”
• “Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”
• “I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.”
• “I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, "He only wrote that to shock." I smile and nod. Precisely.” (quoted by Stephen King in his Danse Macabre)

Ralph Ellison
b. 3-3-1914; Oklahoma City, OK
d. 4-16-1994

Ralph Ellison only published three books during his life. Yet he is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and some say his novel Invisible Man is the most important American work written after World War II. “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe. ... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” ... text from Voices of Diversity poster (no longer available)

• more Ralph Ellison posters

Ralph Waldo Emerson
b. 5-25-1803; Boston, Massachusetts
d. 4-27-1882

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most influential literary figures of the 19th century, was the center of the American transcendental movement, widely known for challenging traditional thought. Emerson was also a tireless crusader for peace and social justice, and supporter of educational reform.

• more Ralph Waldo Emerson posters