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

Margaret Mead
b. 12-16-1901; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
d. 11-15-1978; NYC

Anthropologist Margaret Mead's reports on her research in sexuality and child rearing strongly influenced the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Mead also taught at Columbia University and Fordham University, as well as mentoring numerous students.

Margaret Mead quote ~
• “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

• Margaret Mead 1977 Earth Day Speech

Herman Melville
b. 8-1-1819; NYC
d. 9-28-1891; NYC

Novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet Herman Melville is best known for his novels Moby-Dick (1851), and Billy Budd, first published in 1924.

• Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick
• more Herman Melville Posters

Herman Melville quotes ~
• “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
• “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
• “Art is the objectification of feeling.”
• “Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.”
• “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
• “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken
b. 9-12-1880; Baltimore, MD
d. 1-29-1956; Baltimore

H. L. Mencken, known as the “Sage of Baltimore”, is regarded as one of the most influential journalists and critics of American life and culture.

A student of American English Mencken wrote The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States.

Mencken is also remembered for his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he named the “Monkey” trial.

• A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing

H. L. Mencken quotes ~
• “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”
• “School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.”
• “Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.”
• “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
• “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
• “A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.”
• “Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”
• “Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.”
• “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
• “A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.”
• “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberated scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”
• “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.”

Thomas Merton
b. 1-31-1915; Prades, France
d. 12-10-1968; Bangkok, Thailand

Poet, teacher, social activist and student of comparative religion Thomas Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, as well as scores of essays and reviews. As a Trappist monk he became well known for his dialogues with other faiths and his non-violent stand during the race riots and Vietnam War of the 1960s.

As Merton was leaving the stage after delivering a speech at a peace conference in Bangkok, his parting remark was “Now I am going to disappear.” A short time later he died from touching a poorly grounded electric fan while stepping out of his bath.

Thomas Merton quotes ~
• “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another.”
• “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
• “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.”
• “The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.”
• “The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.”
• “The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.”
• “October is a fine and dangerous season in America, a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.”

• The Seven Storey Mountain

Grace Metalious
née Marie Grace de Repentigny
b. 9-8-1924; Manchester, NH
d. 2-25-1964; Boston (alcoholism)

Grace Metalious is best known for her controversial novel Peyton Place, which sold millions of copies and stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 59 weeks (1956-57).

Grace Metalious quote ~
• “If I had to do it over again," she once remarked, "it would be easier to be poor. Before I was successful, I was as happy as anyone gets.”