James (Grover) Thurber, 1894 - 1961

Humorist James (Grover) Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio (1894)—a comic writer with an angry underbite. In 1927 he met E.B. White at a party and talked his way onto the staff of The New Yorker, which he influenced with his anecdotes, stories, and line sketches of predatory women, timid men and unlikely animals, mostly canine. He created the classic daydreaming hero in his story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1947), and ridiculed psychoanalysis in a book written with E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary? (1929). Thurber, who went blind in mid-life, recalled his New Yorker career in a memoir, The Years With Ross(1959). He also wrote the children's books The 13 Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957).

Edith Wharton, 1862 - 1937

Author Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City (1862). She came from a distinguished New York family, and she grew up stifled under all the rigid social customs of high society. She said, "I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone facades." She decided she wanted to be a writer at an early age, but her parents did not encourage her. She said, "Authorship was considered something between a black art and a form of manual labor."

Wharton was grateful that her parents took her traveling in Europe for much of her childhood, because she got away from many of the New York debutante parties, and she was able to spend most of her time reading. It was in Europe, when she was about 20 years old, that she first met the writer Henry James, though she barely had the courage to speak to him at the time.

Her parents married her off to a man she didn't love when she was 23, and she had to spend the next decade in New York, living the life of a society matron, hosting parties, and leaving herself almost no time to write. Having lived in Europe, she now found New York City to be an awful place to live. She said, "New York is cursed with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried, cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness."

She eventually had a nervous breakdown, and it was while she rested at a sanitarium that she began to write seriously. One of her doctors suggested that writing might impair her recovery, but after The Greater Inclination (1899), her first book of short stories, got great reviews, she disregarded the doctor's advice.

A few years later, she met Henry James again, and the two became great friends. She had just published a few historical novels, which weren't every successful. His advice was that she write about contemporary New York City, the time and place she new best. He said, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."

Wharton took James's advice, and the result was her first great novel, The House of Mirth (1905), about the frustrated love affair between Lawrence Selden and a young woman named Lily Bart. Wharton wrote: "He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. ... She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty."

Wharton went on to write many more novels about frustrated love, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which was the first novel written by a woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.

In her lifetime, most of her novels were best-sellers, even though they had unhappy endings. But after the rise of modernist fiction by writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Wharton's novels began to seem dated. She never understood why stream-of-consciousness writing came into fashion. She said of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."

After her death, many critics considered Wharton a stuffy old woman who wrote novels about manners, and most of her books went out of print. Then in 1975, the biographer R.W.B. Lewis discovered that she had conducted a passionate affair during her marriage, and that she had been much more radical in her letters and her journals than her fiction. Suddenly, feminists and others began to reevaluate her work. Several of her novels were made into movies, most of her books came back into print, and she is now considered one of the great American novelists.

Edith Wharton said, "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."

When I am gone, recall my hair

When I am gone, recall my hair,

Not for the light it used to hold,

But that your touch, enmeshed there,

Has turned it to a younger gold.

Recall my hands, that were not soft

Or white or fine beyond expressing,

Till they had slept so long and oft,

So warm and close, in your possessing.

Recall my eyes, that used to lie

Blind pools with summer's wreckage strewn.

You cleared the drift, but in their sky

You hung no image but your own.

Recall my mouth, that knew not how

A kiss is cradled and takes wing,

Yet fluttered like a nest-hung bough

When you had touched it like the Spring.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

Modern Declaration


I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never
having wavered
In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the
rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied these
loves;
Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having
grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of these
loves;
Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them by
a conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink
Jeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the fingers
of their alert enemies; declare

That I shall love you always.
No matter what party is in power;
No matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied
interest wins the war;
Shall love you always

Art Sanctuary by Nikki Giovanni 1943-

I would always choose to be the person running
rather than the mob chasing
I would prefer to be the person laughed at
rather than the teenagers laughing
I always admired the men and women who sat down
for their rights
And held in disdain the men and women who spat
on them
Everyone deserves Sanctuary a place to go where you are
safe
Art offers Sanctuary to everyone willing
to open their hearts as well as their eyes

Words by Fitzgerald

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

That was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton ... . However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896 - 1940

F. Scott Fitzgerald, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896). In April of 1920, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him an overnight sensation. A week later, he married his sweetheart, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre, in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. They were young and beautiful, and they were emblems of the Jazz Age, a name Fitzgerald himself had coined. Dorothy Parker said they looked "as though they had just stepped out of the sun." By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart—Zelda had her first nervous breakdown in 1930. The changes that came with the Great Depression made F. Scott Fitzgerald seem like ancient history, along with everything else from the "Roaring Twenties." He had written about the lives of the rich, and now he remained associated with them and had fallen out of favor. His books, including The Great Gatsby (1925), did not sell well. In 1929, the Saturday Evening Post paid him $4,000 per story, but his total royalties on seven books that year were only $31.77.

In 1932, as the Great Depression was approaching its worst point, Fitzgerald was living in New York, a city that he loved. He said, "New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." One evening he did what a lot of New Yorkers did that year—he went to the top of the newly built Empire State Building. He wrote about it in his essay "My Lost City": "Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

After The Great Gatsby, it took Fitzgerald nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night. When it came out in 1934, it got a mixed reaction. In the spring of 1936 he was broke, looking for advances from Esquire magazine, but the editor told him he'd have to write something, anything, just to show the accountants. So Fitzgerald looked at his problems, his situation as a writer, and wrote a series of personal essays called "The Crack-Up," about what it was like to hit bottom. The essays were shocking; it was a time when people didn't air their own dirty laundry in public. Fitzgerald's writer friends—Hemingway, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos—didn't understand why he would expose himself in that way. But "The Crack-Up" not only put Fitzgerald's name back out in front of the public, it also paved the way for a new confessional style in American writing. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again." Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44. That year, all of his books sold a total of 72 copies, with royalties of $13. Today, The Great Gatsby alone sells about 300,000 copies a year.

HOWARD NEMEROV 1920 – 1991

Life Cycle of Common Man

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,

This average consumer of the middle class,

Consumed in the course of his average life span

Just under half a million cigarettes,

Four thousand fifths of gin and about

A quarter as much vermouth; he drank

Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee,

And counting his parents’ share it cost

Something like half a million dollars

To put him through life. How many beasts

Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes

Cannot be certainly said.

But anyhow,

It is in this way that a man travels through time,

Leaving behind him a lengthening trail

Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes,

Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown

Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers.

Given the energy and security thus achieved,

He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course,

The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting,

And he worked for the money which was to pay

For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary

If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera,

But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones

Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded

Steadily from the front of his face as he

Advanced into the silence and made it verbal.

Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime

Would barely suffice for their repetition;

If you merely printed all his commas the result

Would be a very large volume, and the number of times

He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,”

Would stagger the imagination. There were also

Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning

“It seems to me” or “As I always say.”

Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man

Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic

Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding

Steadily out of the front of his face, the words

Borne along on the breath which is his spirit

Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word

Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

The individual

*What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

*Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Emerson

*The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual...Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, and treats him accordingly. Henry David Thoreau

Reluctance by Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Desert Places by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Sinclair Lewis, 1885 - 1951

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885), author of Main Street (1920)and Babbitt (1922), and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
He left his hometown in Minnesota as soon as he could. He worked for newspapers and for publishing companies, wrote short stories for magazines, and wrote some potboiler novels and even a few serious novels, but none of his books did very well.
In 1920, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who were editing the satirical magazine American Mercury, met up with 35-year-old "tall, skinny, paprika-headed" Sinclair Lewis, who was unknown in the writing world, at a mutual friend's apartment. Lewis walked up to Mencken and Nathan, put his arms around their shoulders and tightly around their necks, and began yelling at the top of his voice that he was the best writer in the country and that he'd just written the best book in the country, to be published in a week — and being critics, the two of them should duly take note of this. He went on like this at high volume for about half an hour, and when Mencken and Nathan finally escaped, they went to a pub to decompress and concluded that he was an idiot. But Mencken read the book anyway, and was bowled over by it.
The book was Main Street (1920), about a fictional small town in Minnesota called Gopher Prairie, a place inhabited by "a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
Main Street was a huge sensation. No one had ever written such a scathing indictment of small-town American life. Within nine months, it sold about 200,000 copies, and within a few years, the book had sold 2 million copies and he'd become a millionaire. In 1922, he published Babbitt, which was also highly successful. He turned down the Pulitzer Prize that they tried to award him for his 1925 novel Arrowsmith, and when the Swedish Academy called to inform him he was being awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in literature, he thought the phone call was a prank. H.L. Mencken, who'd been so exasperated by Lewis a decade prior, wrote: "The award of the Nobel Prize to Sinclair Lewis gave me immense pleasure. I can imagine no man whose recognition would be more offensive to the general run of American literary patriots. It was a blow exactly in the eye."
Though Sinclair Lewis left Minnesota as a teenager and spent most of his life traveling or living in Washington, D.C., 16 of his 22 novels involved Midwestern towns or Midwestern protagonists. He said he found creative inspiration while "sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States."

From: The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

* “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.”

*“Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every country”

*“Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”

*“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman”

*“Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form”

“There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble”

*"Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.”