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

Orson Welles
b. 5-6-1915; Kenosha, Wisconsin
d. 10-10-1985; Los Angeles, CA

Orson Welles was an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter, as well as an actor, director, and journalist. Welles is perhaps best remembered as the creative force behind the movie Citizen Kane, the fictionalized life of William Randolph Hearst, and for his 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, that terrorized thousands of listeners who thought the East Coast was under Martian attack just before Halloween.

Orson Welles quotes ~
• “I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.”
• “Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.”
• “We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.”
• “My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”

• This is Orson Welles

Herbert George Wells
b. 9-21-1866; Bromley, Kent, England
d. 8-13-1946; London

Author H. G. Wells, though best known for his work in the science fiction genre, he also wrote a three-volume work, The Outline of History. First published in 1920, it popularized history and there is now a 2005 edition.

H. G. Wells quotes ~
• “If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace – that is to say, an effective will for a world law under a world government – for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable – in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end? . . . It is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world cooperation, a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history.”
• “A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.”
• “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
• “Our true nationality is mankind.”

• The Invisible Man book cover
• The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells
• Foreshadowing - Literary Terms posters

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett
b. 7-16-1862; Holly Springs, MS
d. 3-25-1931; Chicago

Ida Wells-Barnett, active in the women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, is best remembered today for her journalistic campaign against racial lynching. Threats against her life and the destruction of her Memphis, TN newspaper office only produced stronger and louder editorials and investigative journalism on the subject.

FYI - Ida Wells was arrested for refusing to give up her train seat to a white man 71 years before Rosa Parks.

Ida B. Wells quotes:
• “I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge.”

• more women posters

Eudora Welty
b. 4-13-1909; Jackson, MS
d. 7-23-2001; Jackson (pheumonia)

Eudora Welty's stories and novels about small town life in the Mississippi Delta were often inspired by photographs she took while working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. Welty was the first living author to be published by the Library of America, and her novel The Optimist's Daughter earned a Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 1973.

Eudora Welty quotes ~
• “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
• “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
• “Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

Mathilde Wesendonck
b. 12-23-1828; Elberfeld, Rhineland, Germany
d. 8-31-1902; Austria (buried in Bonn)

Poet Mathilde Wesendonck infatuated composer Richard Wagner who wrote five songs using her words.

The Living is Easy, Dorothy West (not commercially available poster)

Dorothy West
b. 6-2-1907; Boston, MA
d. 8-16-1998

Dorothy West won the Opportunity short-story prize in 1927 (shared with Zora Neale Hurston). She also was the youngest writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance, founding and editing literary magazines The Challenge and New Challenge.

Nathanael West
née Nathan Weinstein
b. 10-17-1903; NYC, NY
d. 12-22-1940; California (car accident returning from funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Nathanael West, author, screenwriter and satirist, is best remembered for his novels The Day of the Locust (1939) and Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).

Nathanael West quotes ~
• “Numbers constitute the only universal language.”
• “Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.”

Rebecca West
née Cicely Isabel Fairfield
b. 12-21-1892; London, England
d. 3-15-1983; London

Author, journalist, literary critic, travel writer, and committed feminist Rebecca West was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. West had a ten year affair with H. G. Wells.

• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia; Rebecca West

Rebecca West quotes ~
• “There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.”
• “If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.”