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

Francois Rabelais
b. ca. 1493; Lyon, France
d. 4-9-1553

Francois Rabelais, French satirist, doctor and humanist in the Renaissance era, used bawdy jokes and songs to make social commentary on the times.

His writing, which kept him under constant threat of being labeled a heretic then, and can even shock readers today, have been a source of inspiration for artists in many genre.

The artists Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré illustrated Rabelais work, Jules Massenet based his opera Panurge on Rabelais work, and Rumplestiltskin is first mentioned in an adaption of of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Rabelais quotes ~
• “A habit does not a monk make.”
• “Debts and lies are generally mixed together.”
• “Half the world does not know how the other half lives.”
• “I won't undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.”
• “How shall I be able to rule over others, that have not full power and command of myself?”
• “Science without conscience is the death of the soul.”
• “There are more old drunkards than old physicians.”
• “Everything comes in time to those who can wait.”

Jean Racine
b. 12-22-1639; La Ferté-Milon, France
d. 4-21-1699; liver cancer

Dramatist and tragedian Jean Racine was one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition.

Jean Racine quotes ~
• “How good is God! How sweet his yoke!”
• “Justice in the extreme is often unjust.”
• “I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want.”
• “The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.”
• “There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it with reluctance.”

• The Complete Plays of Jean Racine, Volume I: Iphigenia, Andromache

Marie Louise de la Ramée
née Maria Louise Ramé
b. 1-7-1839; Bury St. Edmunds, England
d. 1-25-1908; Viareggio, Italy

Marie Louise de la Ramée used the pen name “Ouida” for her more than 40 novels, children's books, short stories and essays. She is considered an animal rights activist, owning as many as 30 dogs at one time. Also author Jack London said her book Signa was an inspiration to him.

Marie Louise de la Ramée quotes ~
• “It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.”
• “Petty laws breed great crimes.”
• “To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.”
• “Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.”

• A Dog of Flanders

Ayn Rand
née Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum
b. 2-2-1905; St. Petersburg, Russia
d. 3-6-1982; NYC (heart failure)

Novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter Ayn Rand is best known for her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), and her philosophy of Objectivism based on Reason.

Ayn Rand quote ~
• “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”

Vance Randolph
b. 2-23-1892; Pittsburg, KS
d. 11-1-1980; Fayetteville, AR

Vance Randolph, in addition to writing many magazine articles about subjects like sports, published more than a dozen works on folklore, music, dialects and beliefs of the people who lived in the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas. His best seller was Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales.

Vance Randolph quote ~
• “Wherever railroads and highways penetrate, wherever newspapers and movies and radios are introduced, the people gradually lose their distinctive local traits and assume the drab color which characterizes conventional Americans elsewhere. The Ozarkers are changing rather rapidly just now, and it may be that a few more years of progress will find them thinking and acting very much like country folk in other parts of the United States. This standardizing transformation is still far from complete, however. A great body of folk belief dies very slowly, and I suspect that some vestiges of backwoods superstition will be with us for a long time to come.” ~ Introduction to Ozark Magic

Arthur Ransome
b. 1-18-1884; Leeds, England
d. 6-3-1967

Author and journalist Arthur Ransome is best remembered for his children's book Swallows and Amazons.

FYI ~ Ransome was a family friend of noted historian R. G. Collingwood.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
b. 8-8-1896; Washington, DC
d. 12-14-1953; St. Augustine, FL

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is best remembered for The Yearling, the story of a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn. She was awarded a 1939 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the book was made into a movie.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings quotes ~
• “If there can be such a thing as instinctual memory, the consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of the earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without our mothers or our fathers or any other kin or friend, or even human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.”
• “A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.”

Wilson Rawls
b. 9-24-1913; Scraper, Oklahoma
d. 12-16-1984

Wilson Rawls' story about a boy who buys and trains two Redbone Coonhound dogs, “Where the Red Fern Grows” has become a favorite for young readers.

Wilson Rawls quote ~
• “I always take my second original manuscript of Where the Red Fern Grows to show the youngsters. I want to stress to them how important it is to learn to spell, punctuate, and mainly how important it is for them to stay in school. They always look at the manuscript in disbelief. I hope I have some effect on these youngsters, I so enjoy each and every one of them.”
• “Children are always asking me what advice I can give them on trying to be a writer. I always tell them to do a lot of reading, read and study creative writing, then start writing and keep writing and then they can be a writer too. Someday they will make it if they don’t give up.”