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Literacy and society theorists

  • Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
  • George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal…
  • Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse on the 28th of March 1941, her pockets weighted with stones. She had just finished her last novel, Between the…
  • Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the…
  • Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
  • Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges once described his blindness as a gift wrapped in cruel irony. In a poem he wrote that God, with splendid irony, granted him books and…
  • Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia.
  • John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
  • Lev VygotskyLev Vygotsky died on the 11th of June 1934, at the age of 37, leaving behind a final notebook entry that read: "This is the final thing I have done in…
  • Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard once said: "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order." That line, delivered with the offhand…
  • Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
  • David AttenboroughDavid Attenborough turned 100 years old on the 8th of May 2026, and the Royal Albert Hall filled with singers, filmmakers, composers, and royalty to mark the…