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

Alain Leroy Locke, Photographic Print

Alain LeRoy Locke
b. 9-13-1885; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
d. 6-9-1954; NYC

Philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke an educator and patron of the arts best known for his writings on and about the Harlem Renaissance. Called by some the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance”, he was a motivating force in keeping the energy and passion of the Movement at the forefront.

Locke was the first African American Rhodes Scholar and chairman of the Howard University philosophy department.

Alain LeRoy Locke quotes ~
• “The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.”
• “It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source.” The New Negro, 1920
• “. . . not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romanticism, but throught the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature. Art must accept such gifts, and revaluate the giver.”

• The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

John Locke Giclee Print

John Locke
b. 8-29-1632; Wrington, England
d. 10-28-1704

John Locke, known as the “Father of Liberalism”, is one of the most influential Enlightenment era philosophers, and his thought is considered intrumental in the founding of the United States nearly a hundred years after his death.

Locke, who was educated as a physician, defined a person as “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it”... (Essay on Human Understanding, Book 2, Chapter 27, Section 9).

John Locke “Logic - The anatomy of thought.”

John Locke quotes ~
• “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.”
• “Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.”
• “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

• Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration

Jack London
b. 1-12-1876; San Francisco
d. 11-22-1916; Glen Ellen, CA (possible suicide(

Jack London, author of Call of the Wild (1903), was “one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing”. He was largely self-educated, was an advocate of workers rights, unionization, and socialism and considered writing his way out of the trap of poverty.

FYI ~ Martin Johnson, who was to become noted for documentary films made with his wife Osa, began his adventures as a crew member and cook for Jack London's 1907-09 voyage across the south Pacific aboard the Snark. The Snark was named after Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark.

London said Ouida, the pen name for Marie Louise da la Ramee, inspired his writing with her novel Signa.

Jack London was a member of the Bohemian Club with the likes of Frank Gelett Burgess, Ambrose Bierce, John Muir, and Frank Norris.

Jack London quotes ~
• “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
• “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
• “One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.”
• “Charity is the bone you share with your dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.”
• “In answer to your question as to the greatest factors of my literary success, I will state that I consider them to be: Vast good luck. Good health; good brain; good mental and muscular correlation. Poverty. Reading Ouida's Signa at eight years of age. The influence of Herbert Spencer's Philosophy of Style. Because I got started twenty years before the fellows who are trying to start today.” Eight Factors of Literary Success , in Labor, Earle (ed.) (1994) Viking Penguin. The Portable Jack London, p. 512.

• The Call of the Wild Movie Poster

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
b. 2-27-1807; Portland, ME
d. 3-24-1882; Massachusetts

During Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's lifetime, his poetry was translated into 24 languages and he became the first American poet to be honored in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London.

• more Henry Wadsworth Longfellow posters

Audre Lorde
b. 2-18-1934; NYC, NY
d. 11-17-1992; St. Croix (breast cancer)

Writer and activist Audre Lorde was the State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

Audre Lorde quotes ~
• “For women . . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
• “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
• “. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.”

Jane Loudon, née Webb
b. 8-19-1807; Birmingham, England
d. 1858

Jane Loudon is best known for illustrations and co-authoring gardening manuals with her husband, and not for being a pioneer in science fiction. Her novel Mummy! was written to support herself at age 17, when her father died penniless.

• botanists
• more flower posters

H. P. Lovecraft
b. 8-20-1890; Providence, RI
d. 3-15-1937

H. P. Lovecraft, the most important US horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe, influenced nearly every major figure in the horror, fantasy and science fiction genre after his day. His Cthulhu Mythos has a cult following.

H. P. Lovecraft quote ~
• “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace
b. 12-10-1815; London, England
d. 11-27-1852

Not a traditional “author”, mathematician Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, is considered to have written the first computer program in her correspondence with Charles Babbage about his early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

Augusta Ada Byron quotes ~
• “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
• “Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage's Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.”

• Ada, Countess of Lovelace