Author, Poet & Novelist Posters & Prints: “Ja...-Ji...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and scholars.

Shirley Jackson
b. 12-14-1916; San Francisco
d. 8-8-1965; North Bennington, VT (heart failure)

Shirely Jackson first received wide critical acclaim for her short story 'The Lottery', which was published in 1948.

Shirley Jackson quotes ~
• “I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.”
• “I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.”

Harriet Jacobs
b. 1813; Edenton, NC
d. 3-7-1897; Washington, DC

Harriet Jacobs spent seven years hiding in a crawl space to avoid the advances of her owner and still be close enough to hear the voices of her children, before escaping North. She wrote her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, to awaken Northern women to the abuses done to female slaves.

Harriet Jacobs quote ~
“The bill of sale!? Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York!... I well know the value of that bit of paper, but much as I love freedom, I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his.” The quote refers to Cornelia Willis, her employer and friend, buying her freedom for $300 in 1852.

FYI - Jacobs worked as a nurse-maid in the home of literary editor Nathaniel Parker Willis.

Alice James
b. 8-7-1848; NYC, NY
d. 3-6-1892; England (breast cancer)

Alice James, remembered today for her diary which was published many years after her death, was the daughter and sister of notable and accomplished men (father, the clergyman Henry James, Sr., brothers philosopher and psychologist William James and novelist Henry James). She suffered several nervous breakdowns and her diary, “full of witty, acerbic, insightful comments” is described as the searching of a woman for her own voice. She never married, living always with her parents and for a time taught history for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a Boston-based correspondence school for women.

Alice James quotes ~
• “How sick one gets of being ‘good,’ how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.”
• “What difference is there in the spiritual essence of two viragoes fighting on their door-steps over a coal-ticket, left or not left by the district visitor and that of two great ladies at daggers drawn over their seat at some function or other? – all simply scrambling for something they haven't got.”
• “What an awful loss it is that we can't see our own follies, they must be so much more exquisite than any one's else, but as vanity is what keeps the world agoing, after one or two convulsive laughs, the game would certainly be up!”
• “The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.”

Henry James
b. 4-15-1843; NYC, NY
d. 2-28-1916; London

Writer Henry James, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism, is primarily remembered for a series of novels portraying the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

Henry James quotes ~
• “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” Henry James quote ecard
• “Deep experience is never peaceful.”
• “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
• “Experience is never limited, and it is never completed; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”

FYI - James was influenced by French author Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly.

• The Portable Henry James

William James
b. 1-11-1842;; NYC, NY
d. 8-26-1910; NH

William James, recognized as a pioneering psychologist and philosopher wrote extensively of education, religious experience and pragmatism, perhaps drew on his own personal experience of physical ailments and bouts of depression. James, who also became a Harvard professor, was the son of Swedenborgian theologian Henry James, Sr. and brother of author Henry James and diarist Alice James, was also the godson of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Robinson Jeffers
b. 1-10-1887; Allegheny, Pennsylvania
d. 1-20-1962

Poet Robinson Jeffers wrote mostly about the central California coast in “classic narrative and epic form” and is best known today as an icon of the environmental movement.

Robinson Jeffers quotes ~
• “Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.”
• “Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.”
• “Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.”
• “There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.”

• Selected Poems Robinson Jeffers

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
b. 1-20-1873; Farsø, Jutland, Denmark
d. 11-25-1950; Copenhagen

Danish writer Johannes Vilhelm Jensen received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944 “for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style.”

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen quotes ~
• “A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.”
• “The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.”
• “For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.”

• Jensen: The Long Journey; Translated from the Danish by A. G. Chater with an introduction by Francis Hackett

Sarah Orne Jewett
b. 9-3-1849; South Berwick, Maine
d. 6-24-1909; South Berwick

Sarah Orne Jewett is best remembered for her descriptions of the New England coast of Maine. Willa Cather credited Jewett with her development as a writer.

Sarah Orne Jewett quotes ~
• “Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.”
• “A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.”
• “Look bravely up into the sky,
And be content with knowing
That God wished for a buttercup
Just here, where you are growing.”
• “This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.”
• “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.” ~ Letter to Willa Cather

• Sarah Orne Jewett at Amazon

Juan Ramon Jimenez
b. 12-24-1881; Moguer, Spain
d. 5-29-1958; Puerto Rico

Andalusian poet Juan Ramon Jimenez was a a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956 “for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity”.

Juan Ramon Jimenez quotes ~
• “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
• “Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.”

• Time and Space: A Poetic Autobiography