Photo Credit: Strong Nation

“One thing to remember is to talk to the animals. If you do, they will talk back to you. But if you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.”

- Chief Dan George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, author, poet, and an Academy Award-nominated actor

Photo Credit: Sergey Bermeniev/npr

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

- Elie Wiesel, a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor.

[If you have not read Wiesel's memoir Night, you should. His memoir is quite harrowing about the horrors of the Holocaust and living with survivor's guilt. Also he discusses the importance of never forgetting those who died during it.]

Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) writing in notebook at time of first production of his play “Pygmalion.” (LIFE)

“I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”

- George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, wrote this in his 1921 play Back to Methuselah.

Here are typewriters used by some of the most famous writers and storytellers of the last century. The oldest typewriter is J.R.R. Tolkien’s early 1900′s Hammond typewriter.

A bit of information about the writers in case you are unfamiliar with some of the names:

Ernest Hemingway – (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) – Author whose novels include novels include A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.

John Steinbeck – (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) – Writer who penned the following: The Grapes of Wrath. East of Eden and Of Mice and Men.

Bob Dylan – (May 24, 1941) – Dylan is a singer-songwriter and created such songs as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changin” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Hunter S. Thompson – (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) – As a journalist and author, Thompson wrote The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Cormac McCarthy – (July 20, 1933) – Many of McCarthy’s novels have been adopted into motion pictures, such as The Road, No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.

George Orwell – (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) – Orwell’s work tend to deal with social injustice and seen in the following novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia.

J.R.R. Tolkien – (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) – Tolkien is known mostly for his fantasy works as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Jack Kerouac – (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) – An author and poet, Kerouac’s novel On the Road is often considered a pioneering piece in the postwar literary movement the Beat Generation.

Woody Allen – (December 1, 1935) – Annie Hall and 2011′s Midnight in Paris are among the most popular films that were created and directed by Allen.

Aged 30 by the Swiss artist Alexandre Louis François d’Albert Durade. (Source)

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been.”

- Mary Anne Evans, English novelist (known better under her pen name: George Eliot)

John Tenniel's original illustrations of Tweedledee and Tweedledum from Carroll's 1871 "Through the Looking-Glass."

Definition: Two people or entities that are alike.

Origins: In 1725, poet John Byrom coined “tweedledum” and “tweedledee” when he used those terms to make fun of two quarreling composers (Handel and Bononcini). Byrom stated that both composers had similar music and because of this, one was “tweedledum” and the other “tweedledee.” The term later gained notoriety and popularity when Lewis Carroll used the term for two twin brothers in his 1872 successful novel Through the Looking-Glass.

Ammer, Christine. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997, 684.

Mark Twain, 1907. Photo Credit: The Mark Twain House, Harford/PBS

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

- Mark Twain

Photo via pbs.org

Mary had a little lamb and Thomas Edison

“Mary had a little lamb,” is perhaps the most popular children’s song. In 1830, Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston wrote this popular rhyme after hearing a story of a lamb following its young owner to school. It was published in the fall edition of Juvenile Miscellany, a children’s journal that Hale was editor of.

On November 20, 1877, Thomas Edison recorded the first words of human speech into his phonograph. Those first words were “Mary had a little lamb.”

Panati, Charles. Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Harper & Row, 1987, 196.

[Photo]

Sinclair Lewis

In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his novel Arrowsmith, but he refused it because he did not agree with awards based on author competition. For Lewis, the Nobel Prize was different since it is based on an author’s entire body of work instead of individual novels. Another reason Lewis did not accept the Pulitzer could be his bitterness from losing it twice before for Main Street (1921) and Babbitt (1923). He stated that he would have accepted the Pulitzer for either Main Street or Babbitt had either won.

[Information - The Sinclair Lewis Society]

[Photo - mnhs.org]

The first million-dollar American novelist was Jack London (1876-1916). The first writer to become a billionaire was J.K. Rowling.

J.K. Rowling

[Photos - Jack London and J.K. Rowling]