Curated category
Writers who illustrated their own writing
- Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci left behind 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, and almost none of it was written the way you would expect.
- John LennonAt approximately 5:00 p.m. on the 8th of December 1980, John Lennon autographed a copy of his new album for a man named Mark David Chapman outside his New…
- J. R. R. TolkienOn the evening of his 21st birthday, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien sat down and wrote a letter to a young woman named Edith Mary Bratt.
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient…
- Jules VerneJules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare.
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold.
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- H. G. WellsIn 1898, Joseph Conrad hailed a fellow writer with the phrase "O Realist of the Fantastic!" The man he addressed was Herbert George Wells, born in Bromley…
- Dr. SeussTheodor Seuss Geisel was born on the 2nd of March, 1904, on Fairfield Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, within walking distance of a road called Mulberry…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world…
- René DescartesRené Descartes opened his treatise on emotions, the Passions of the Soul, with a startling promise. He would write on the topic, he said, "as if no one had…
- 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.
- William BlakeWilliam Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil so he could keep sketching. He was near death, working feverishly on illustrations for Dante's…
- Karel ČapekKarel Čapek died on Christmas Day, 1938, of pneumonia, and the Gestapo did not even know he was gone. Months later, Nazi agents arrived at his Prague home to…
- Clive BarkerClive Barker was three years old when he saw a man fall out of the sky. At an air show in Liverpool, the French skydiver Leo Valentin plummeted to the ground…
- Yoshitaka AmanoYoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, in 1952, the youngest of four children. His father, Yoshio Amano, was a lacquer artist who…
- Ingri and Edgar Parin d'AulaireIngri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire spent their careers turning the myths of ancient worlds and the heroes of a new country into picture books that generations…
- Pauline BaynesPauline Diana Baynes was born on the 9th of September 1922 at 67 Brunswick Place in Hove, East Sussex. Her family moved to India when she was still a baby.