Authors Posters & Prints, “Sap...-Saw...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers and scholars.

Sappho
b. c. 630-612 BC; Isl. of Lesbos
d. c. 570 BC

Sappho was an Ancient Greek lyric poet.

Sappho quotes ~
• “There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.”
• “Although only breath, words which I command are immortal.”
• “Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us.”

• Sappho: A New Translation

The Notebook, Jose Saramago (no commercially available image)

Jose Saramago
b. 11-16-1922; Azinhaga, Santarém, Portugal
d. 6-18-2010; Tías, Lanzarote Island, Spain

Playwright and novelist Jose Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature as one “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”

Jose Saramago quotes ~
• “Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.”
• “I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
• “What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?”

Victorien Sardou, Photographic Print

Victorien Sardou
b. 9-7-1831; Paris, France
d. 11-8-1908; Paris (pulmonary congestion)

The term “well-made play”, la pièce bien faite, is associated the dramatist Victorien Sardou. Sardou developed the structure of his plays from the rules for drama described by Eugène Scribe “very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the action, with most of the story taking place before the action of the play; much of the information regarding such previous action would be revealed through thinly veiled exposition”.

Sardou, whose life and career were saved by a benefactress and first wife Mlle de Brecourt, is often associated with Sarah Bernhardt. The play Fedora, written for Bernhardt, was adapted into an opera of the same name by Umberto Giordano.

The play La Tosca, a five act drama was first performed by Bernhardt, and then was adapted by Giacomo Puccini for opera.

George Bernard Shaw made fun of Sardou's work, calling it “Sardoodledom.”

William Saroyan
b. 8-31-1908; Fresno, CA
d. 5-18-1981

William Saroyan, son of Armenian immigrants, set many of his stories and plays in the community where he grew up. His first break came with his work The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze showcased in Story magazine.

William Saroyan quotes ~
• “The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
• “I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.”
• “The role of art is to make a world which can be tolerated.”
• “I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?”

John-Paul Sartre
b. 6-21-1905; Paris, France
d. 4-15-1980

John-Paul Sartre, an “existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic”, was one of the leading figures in 20th century.

Sartre had a long relationship with the author and social theorist, Simone de Beauvoir, and was a first cousin of Albert Schweitzer.

Sartre was also awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age”, but refused the honor.

John-Paul Sartre quotes ~
• “A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”
• “All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.”
• “Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”
• “Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”
• “Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
• “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
• “It is only in our decisions that we are important.”
• “There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.”

• Nausea

Siegfried Sassoon
b. 9-8-1886; Matfield, Kent, England
d. 9-1-1967; Heytesbury, Wiltshire

Siegfried Sassoon was one of the World War I poets commemorated in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Siegfried Sassoon quotes ~
• “Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.”
~ The Counter-Attack, 1918
• “You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”
~ Suicide in the Trenches

Ruth Sawyer
b. 8-5-1880; Boston, MA
d. 6-3-1970; Maine

Ruth Sawyer, the “great lady of American storytelling”, was also a teacher and author. Sawyer's best known book, Roller Skates, received the Newbery Medal in 1937. She collaborated with her son-in- law Robert McCloskey for Journey Cake, Ho!, which won a Caldecott Honor for 1954.

Dorothy L. Sayers
b. x6-13-1893; Oxford, England
d. 12-17-1957; Witham, Essex, UK

Dorothy Leigh Sayers is most remembered as a writer of crime stories that portray an aristocratic amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, as an essayist, and a translator. She considered her traslation of Dante's Divine Comedy as her best work.

Sayers also was employed as a copywriter in an advertising agency, as well as being associated with Christian apologetics and feminism.