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

John Keats
b. 10-31-1795; London, England
d. 2-23-1821; tuberculosis

John Keats was one of the most important Romantic poets and his letters are among the most celebrated by any English poet. He was a contemporary of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

FYI - Keats was granted an apothecary licence but chose instead to dedicate his life to poetry.

John Keats quotes ~
• “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”
• “'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
• “Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”
• “In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time.”
• “Son of the old moon-mountains African!/ Stream of the Pyramid and Crocodile!/We call thee fruitful, and that very while/A desert fills our seeing's inward span.” Sonnet – To the Nile

• John Keats poetry page
• Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats
• Ode to a Grecian Urn / Poetry Forms Ode Poster

Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley (no commerically available poster)

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (Keckly)
b. February 1818; Virginia
d. May 1907; Washington, DC

A former slave who became a successful seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, authored her autobiography, Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, about her time as Mary Todd Lincoln's personal modiste and confidante.

Henrietta Keddie
b. 1827; Cuper, Scotland
d. 6-8-1914; England

Henrietta Keddie used the pseudonym Sarah Tytler to write children's books.

• Musical composers and their works: for the use of schools and students in music

Helen Adams Keller
b. 6-27-1880; Tuscumbia, AL
d. 6-1-1968; Easton, Connecticut

• more Helen Keller posters

Frances Anne Kemble
b. 11-27-1809; London, England
d. 1893; England

Frances Anne Kemble was an actress and writer; her aunt was the notable tragedienne Sarah Siddons.

Kemble married American Pierce Butler in 1834. He later inherited a plantation with slaves and they spent the time on Sea Island, Georgia which she described in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.

Kemble was shocked by the conditions of the slaves and their treatment and she tried to better their conditions and complained to her husband about slavery. Tensions developed in the marriage and they divorced in 1849, with Butler keeping custody of the two daughters until they came of age.

She returned to the stage in 1847 in order to support herself and was reunited with her daughters when they turned 21. The eldest daughter married a doctor named Owen Jones Wister and they were the parents of Owen Wister, the author of the 1902 western novel, “The Virginian”.

• Civil War posters

Jack Kerouac
b. 3-12-1922; Lowell, MA
d. 10-21-1969; St. Petersburg, Florida

Novelist and poet Jack Kerouac is considered a literary iconoclast, one who challenged the establishment.

Kerouac, with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, were pioneers of the Beat Generation, a post World War II cultural movement that was characterized by experimental drug use, interest in Eastern religion, rejection of materialism, and spontaneous creativity.

Kerouac was one of many writers who are associated with Tangier, Morocco.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”
On The Road, 1957

On the Road Book Jacket print

• The Portable Jack Kerouac
• East Village Guide Map Poster

Ken Kesey
b. 9-17-1935; La Junta, CO
d. 11-10-2001; Pleasant Hill, Oregon

Ken Kesey was the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”.

Ken Kesey quote ~
• “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer – they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”

Francis Parkinson Keyes
b. 7-21-1885; Charlottesville, VA
d. 7-3-1970

Francis Parkinson Keyes was a popular and best selling author of the 1940s and 50s whose works frequently featured Catholic themes and beliefs. Her novels, set in New England, Virginia, Louisiana, Normandy and South America, reflect her upbringing and extensive travel as the wife of Henry Keyes, a US Senator from New Hampshire.

Frances Parkinson Keyes quote ~
• “Folks with their wits about them knew that advertisements were just a pack of lies - you had only to look at the claims of patent medicines!”