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

Edna Ferber
b. 8-15-1885; Kalamazoo, MI
d. 4-16-1968; NYC (cancer)

Edna Ferber was a journalist, novelist, playwright and member of the Algonquin Round Table. Among her work are familiar titles in movies and musicals - So Big, Show Boat, Stage Door, Cimarron, American Beauty, Dinner at Eight, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant.

Edna Ferber quotes ~
• “Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.”
• “Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
• “Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.”
• “Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.”
• “To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge - this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.”
• “A closed mind is a dying mind.”

• Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle

Abu'l-Qasim Ferdowsi
fl. 940–1020 CE

Persian poet Ferdowsi was the author of the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran.

• Ferdowsi at Amazon

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
b. 3-24-1919; Yonkers, NY

Poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was acquitted of promoting obsentity for publishing and selling Allen Ginsburg's Howl.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti quotes ~
• “Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.”
• “Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.”
• “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.”
• “I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.”
• “Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.”
• “Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.”
• “It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.”

Fanny Fern
née Sara Payson Willis
b. 7-9-1811; Portland, ME
d. 10-10-1872; Manhattan (cancer)

Fanny Fern, the pen name of Sara Payson Willis Parton who was a novelist and children's author, was also the highest paid newspaper writer in the United States in 1855.

Sara attended Catharine Beecher's school in Hartford, was a suffrage supporter, praised the work of Walt Whitman, and co-founded Sorosis, the first professional women's club in the US.

FYI- Sara Payson Willis Parton's brother, Richard Storrs Willis, wrote the melody for “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”, and her brother Nathaniel Parker Willis was a magazine writer and editor.

Fanny Fern quotes ~
• “I am convinced that there are times in everybody's experience when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.”
• “There are no little things. Little things are the hinges of the universe.”
• “Marriage is the hardest way to get a living.”

• Ruth Hall and Other Writings by Fanny Fern