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

Thomas Hardy
b. 6-2-1840; Stinsford, Dorchester, Dorset, England
d. 1-11-1928; Dorchester
“The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.” — The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy, whose father was a stonemason and trained as an architect before committing to writing, regarding himself as a poet who composed novels for financial gain. Among his work are the classics Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, illustrated by Helen Allingham.

Thomas Hardy quotes ~
• “Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.”
• “Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.”
• “If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”
• “The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.”
• “To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.”

• Thomas Hardy at Amazon

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
b. 9-24-1825; Baltimore, MD
d. 2-22-1911; Philadelphia (?)

Frances Harper, an African American abolitionist and poet, was born to free parents. She published her first book of poetry at age twenty, in 1859 Watkins's tale “The Two Offers” appeared in the Anglo-African, the first short story to be published by an African-American, and her first novel, Iola Leroy: Shadows Uplifted (1892), at age 67.

Harper turned her energy to temperance and universal suffrage after the Civil War. In 1873 she became Superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union and in 1894 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president, 1895-1911. Harper wrote and lectured against lynching, along with Ida B. Wells, and was also a member of the Universal Peace Union.

She lived with the William Still family for a time.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper quotes ~
• “No race can afford to neglect the enlightenment of its mothers.”
• “We want more soul, a higher cultivation of all spiritual faculties. We need more unselfishness, earnestness, and integrity. We need men and women whose hearts are the homes of high and lofty enthusiasm and a noble devotion to the cause of emancipation, who are ready and willing to lay time, talent, and money on the altar of universal freedom.”
• “Every mother should endeavor to be a true artist., who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life.”

Joel Chandler Harris
b. 12-8-1848; Eatonton, Georgia
d. 7-3-1908; Atlanta, Georgia

Joel Chandler Harris, journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist, is best known for his collection of “Uncle Remus” stories. Uncle Remus is the fictional narrator, a traditional storytelling device, employed by Harris.

Joel Chandler Harris quotes ~
• “I am in the prime of my senility.”
• “Watch out when you're getting all you want. Fattening hogs ain't in luck.”

• Joel Chandler Harris Home, Atlanta, Georgia Art Print
• The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus

A Hubert Harrison Reader (not commerically available poster)

Hubert Harrison
b. 4-27-1883; (now U.S. Virgin Islands)
d. 12-17-1927; NYC (appendicitis)

Hubert Harrison, a West Indian born writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical political activist, was based in Harlem, New York. Harrison was described by A. Philip Randolph as “the father of Harlem radicalism”.

Moss Hart
b. 10-24-1904; NYC, NY
d. 12-20-1961; Palm Springs, CA

Moss Hart was a playwright and director best remembered for his musical theatre productions on Broadway. Hart also wrote The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It With You (1938 - Best Picture). Moss Hart was married to singer and actress Kitty Carlisle.

Moss Hart quotes ~
• “All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'.”
• “Boredom is the keynote of poverty – of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with – for where there is no money there is no change of any kind.”

Bret Harte
née Francis Brett Hart
b. 8-25-1836; Albany, NY
d. 5-6-1902; Camberley, England

Author and journalist Bret Harte is remembered today for his reports of early California. While in California he met Mark Twain and Ina Coolbrith.

FYI - Many of Bret Harte's work has inspired screenplays: Paddy Chayefsky's Paint Your Wagon from “Tennessee Partner”, and the spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse from “The Outcast of Poker Flat” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp”.

Bret Harte quote ~
• “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.”

• Bret Harte's Gold Rush: Outcasts of Poker Flat, the Luck of Roaring Camp, Tennessee's Partner, & Other Favorites

Jan de Hartog
b. 4-22-1914; Haarlem, Netherlands
d. 9-22-2002; Houston, Texas

Playwright, novelist, Quaker, and occasional social critic Jan de Hartog is noted for his seafaring stories. His first novel Hollands Glorie (Holland's Glory), published just days before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, brought him under the ire of the Gestapo.

His experiences in WWII eventually lead him to pacifism. One of his most notable books was The Peaceable Kingdom: An American Saga (1972) about the lives of George Fox and Margaret Fell, for which he was nominated for a Nobel Prize.

Jan de Hartog quote ~
• “Do not commit the error common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.”

Gabriel Harvey
b. 1545; England
d. 1630

Gabriel Harvey a writer and scholar who wanted to be “epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter”. (Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet.) He is best remembered today as “the prime mover in the literary clique known as the Areopagus that wanted to impose the Latin rules of quantity on English verse”. Harvey was also teacher and friend to poet Edmund Spenser.