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

Christopher Smart
b. 4-11-1722; Shipbourne, England
d. 5-21-1771; debtors prison, London

Christopher Smart, also known as “Kit Smart”, is best remembered as a religious poet and for having written his exuberant lyric ‘A Song to David’ and the cryptic ‘Jubilate Agno’ while locked away in a madhouse at the suggestion of his father-in-law, the publisher John Newbery (namesake of the Newbery Award).

Lillian Smith
b. 12-12-1897; Jasper, FL
d. 9-28-1966

Social critic and activist Lillian Smith is best remembered for her best-selling 1944 novel Strange Fruit. Smith, Southern born and raised, openly supported unpopular stances on the issues of race and gender equality, calling for the removal of Jim Crow laws. Lillian Smith was also a teacher, the director of the family owned girl's summer camp in Georgia, and publisher with long time companion Paula Snelling of the literary magazine South Today.

Lillian Smith quotes ~
• “Rich folks always talk hard times.”
• “Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.”

Tobias Smollett
b. 3-19-1721; Renton, Scotland
d. 9-17-1771; Italy

Tobias Smollett was a poet and author best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens. He was also qualified as a surgeon.

Lemony Snicket,
née Daniel Handler
b. 2-28-1970; San Francisco

Lemony Snicket is both the legal nom de plume of novelist Daniel Handler and a fictional character within a series of children's books written by Handler.

• The Trouble Begins: A Box of Unfortunate Events, Books 1-3

Edgar Snow
b. 7-17-1905; Kansas City, MO
d. 2-15-1972; Geneva

Journalist Edgar Snow started out on a round the world trip in 1928 and ended up spending staying in China until 1941. He is best remembered for his 1937 book, Red Star Over China, about the Chinese Communist movement. He is believed to be the first Westerner to interview Mao Zedong.

Gary Snyder
b. 5-8-1930; San Francisco, CA

Gary Snyder is called the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology” and Lawrence Ferlinghetti referred to him as ‘the Thoreau of the Beat Generation’. Snyder's work has been recognized with a Pulitizer Prize (Turtle Island, 1974), Bollingen and Ruth Lilly Prize.

Gary Snyder quotes ~
• “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
• “Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”
• “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”
• “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”
• “Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe.”
• “Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”