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

Joyce Carol Oates
b. 6-16-1938; Lockport, NY

Joyce Carol Oates has published over fifty novels, and many short stories, poetry and pieces of non-fiction since 1963. She was awarded the 1969 National Book Award for Them; and three novels have been nominated for the Pulitizer Prize. Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978.

Joyce Carol Oates quotes ~
• “Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.”
• “Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.”
• “Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.”
• “The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”

Flann O'Brien
b. 10-5-1911; Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland
d. 4-1-1966; Dublin

Flann O'Brien, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan, also wrote under the pen name of Myles na Gopaleen.

Seán O'Casey
b. 3-30-1880; Dublin, Ireland
d. 9-18-1964; Torquay, England

Sean O'Casey, a dramatist and memoirist, wrote about the Dublin working classes.

The 1965 film Young Cassidy is based on the life of Seán O'Casey; in 1929 Alfred Hitchcock produced Juno and the Paycock (known as The Shame of Mary Boyle in the US).

Seán O'Casey quotes ~
• “Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.”
• “I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.”
• “There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.”

• Sean O'Casey: Writer At Work - A Biography

Flannery O’Connor
b. 3-25-1925; Savannah, Georgia
d. 8-3-1964; Milledgeville, Georgia

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Poster Text: The novels and stories of Flannery O'Connor are about life in the rural South. They are full of strange characters who often have emotional or spiritual problems and are obsessed with religion. However, O'Connor's writing is also full of humor, irony and satire. She wrote about people she knew – country judges, farmers, peddlers – and she is said to have been a shrewd listener who loved to keep track of people's conversations for later use in her writing. She was an expert at using rural southern speech, settings and characters in her stories. Sadly, at age 25, Flannery O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus, a rare and incurable blood disease that had killed her father at a young age. Afer the diagnosis, she lived a very restricted life, writing stories and raising peacocks on her mother's Georgia farm. When she died at age 39, O'Connor had already completed two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), as well as thirty-one short stories. Her two collections of short stories are A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955) and *Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), published after her death. The stories in these two collections were included in Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories, (1971), which won the 1972 National Book Award for fiction.

*FYI - The thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was important to Flannery O'Connor. Her short story collection “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is in reference to Teilhard's “Omega Point” – “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”

• Flannery O’Connor at Amazon.com
• more American Authors of the 20th Century posters

Clifford Odets
b. 7-18-1906; Philadelphia, PA
d. 8-18-1963; Los Angeles, CA (colon cancer)

Playwright, screenwriter, and movie director Clifford Odets used his art form to criticize exploitative economic systems. His reputation as a socialist and social protester earned him the distinction of being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952 where he repeated names already revealed. His bending to the pressure of the committee tormented him for the rest of his life.

FYI- Odets’ first wife was actress Luise Rainer.

Clifford Odets quotes ~
• “It is weird! The child raised by a dominating, authoritarian parent, develops both resistance and emulation. The thing, in other words, is bitterly fought but is simultaneously seen as some powerful thing, admirable, to be imitated. Hell results!”
• “Life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.”
• “One night some short weeks ago, for the first time in her not always happy life, Marilyn Monroe's soul sat down alone to a quiet supper from which it did not rise.”

Kenzaburo Oe
b. 1-31-1935; Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture, Japan

Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for “an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

Kenzaburo Oe quotes ~
• “However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.”
• “As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.”
• “By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.”