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

Bram Stoker
b. 11-8-1847; Dublin, Ireland
d. 4-20-1912

Irish author Bram Stoker is best known as the author of 'Dracula', a vampire based on the mythological/folkloric beings who feed on the life essence, usually in the form of blood, of living creatures.

Bram Stoker quotes ~
• “I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.”

• Dracula: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical and Cultural Contexts
• book cover posters

FYI - vampire bats do exist in South America.

Tom Stoppard,
née Tomas Straussler
b. 7-3-1937; Zlin, Czechoslovakia

Sir Tom Stoppard (knighted 1997), has written for stage, film, radio and TV. In 2008 Time Magazine included him in its 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Tom Stoppard quotes ~
• “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
• “If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”
• “If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.”
• “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.”
• “I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”
• “It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.”
• “James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”

Rex Stout
b. 12-1-1886; Noblesville, IN (raised in Kansas)
d. 10-24-1975; CT

Crime writer Rex Stout is best remembered as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe.

Rex Stout quotes ~
• “I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.”
• “A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe
b. 6-14-1811; Litchfield, CT
d. 7-1-1896; Hartford, CT

Abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) attacked the cruelty of slavery. Historians consider her efforts a significant force in leading to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln said, when he met Stowe, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great great war!”

Harriet Beecher Stowe quote ~
• “I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.”

• Harriet Beecher Stowe posters

Lytton Strachey
b. 3-1-1880; London, England
d. 1-21-1932; Ham, Wiltshire (stomach cancer)

Writer and critic Lytton Strachey is best known for being a member of the talented Strachey family and writing psychological insightful and sympathetic biographies with “irreverence and wit”. Notable are his 1921 biography Queen Victoria which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Eminent Victorians. His lover, the artist Dora Carrington, committed suicide two months after Strachey's death.

Lytton Strachey quotes ~
• “Discretion is not the better part of biography.”
• “Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”
• “There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.”

Gottfried von Strassburg (Godfrey of Strasbourg)
d. c 1210

Gottfried is considered the author of the courtly narrative romance Tristan from the late German Middle Ages, which came to be inspiration for Richard Wagner's operatic works.

The story of Tristan is basically the beginning of the our contemporary concept of love, a person to person relationship (see Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth - Tales of Love and Marriage).

Gene Stratton-Porter
b. 8-17-1863; Lagro, Indiana
d. 12-6-1924; Los Angeles (car accident)

Author, amateur naturalist, and wildlife photographer Geneva Stratton-Porter used her popularity and income as a writer to support conservation of Limberlost Swamp and other Indiana wetlands. Her best remembered stories are “Freckles”, “Laddie”, and “Girl of the Limberlost.”

FYI ~ She was an avid reader, becoming one of the first women to form a movie studio and production company, despite not finishing high school.

Gene Stratton-Porter quotes ~
• “Is he well educated?”
"Yes, I think so, as far as he's gone," I answered. "Of course he will go on being educated every day of his life, same as father. He says it is all rot about 'finishing' your education. You never do. You learn more important things each day....” ~ Laddie
• “...The world is full of happy people but no one ever hears of them. You have to fight and make a scandal to get in the papers. No one knows about all the happy people...” ~ Girl of the Limberlost
• “In the economy of nature nothing is ever lost. I cannot believe that the soul of man shall prove the one exception.”

• Gene Stratton-Porter at Amazon

Johan August Strindberg
b. 1-22-1849; Stockholm, Sweden
d. 5-14-1912; Stockholm

Best known for his play 'Miss Julie', Strindberg was also a telegrapher, painter, photographer and alchemist.

Johan August Strindberg quotes ~
• “I always disliked dogs, those protectors of cowards who lack the courage to fight an assailant themselves.”

Jan Struther
née Joyce Anstruther
b. 6-6-1901; England
d. 7-20-1953; NY

Jan Struther is best remembered as the creator of the fictional character Mrs. Miniver. Originally published as a series of newspaper columns about the every day life reflecting the times leading up to World War II, a book was published in 1939 and then adapted into a film that was the Best Picture Academy Award winning movie in 1942.