Enjoy the company of four of the world's greatest writers at your dining table. This set of four cotton napkins featuring the typewritten letters of Jack London, Emily Dickinson, D.H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain will enliven any meal. Never mind that Emily Dickinson's loveletter to Susie was written about ten years prior to the invention of the typewriter—it will melt your heart. Mark Twain's note to a young child named Joy will make you rethink every letter you have ever written. "The idea of your house going to the wanton expense of a flower garden!—aren't you enough? And what do...
Joyce Carol Oates: A Love Letter to Libraries in Longhand
Author Joyce Carol Oates."I try to write in the morning very intensely,from 8:30 to 1 p.m...I hand write and then I type.I don't have a word processor. I write slowly."(By Landon Nordeman for Smithsonian Magazine.) Contrary to Thomas Wolfe's dictum You Can't Go Home Again, in an article in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, "Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again," the eponymous author begs to differ. Joyce Carol Oates regales readers with a reverie on things changed and unchanged in the town of her birth, and reacquaints herself with the landmarks and buildings of a place that has continued...
Famous Authors Drawn, Not Quartered
Martin Droeshout's 1623 Engraving Of William Shakespeare.The purpose of any portrait is to capture the essence of the subject. To somehow convey in a single image not just the outward appearance of the sitter, but his soul. But if the subject is a great writer, does that task become impossible? Poet Ben Jonson thought so, and maybe the curators at Princeton University's Firestone Library do, too.Those curators have just opened a new exhibit of 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, marble sculptures, and plaster death masks, depicting literary giants. The title of the gallery show is: The Author's Portrait. But the...
Author 2.0
It seems like the days of an author simply writing their way to bookshelves across America are coming to end.In his essay in the New York Times, See the Web Site, Buy the Book, J. Courtney Sullivan tracks the evolution of author Web sites and the "sizable industry" that has sprung up to meet the demand.HarperStudio, the new tech-savvy publisher who "believe traditional publishing models are broken and are experimenting with new ones," recently held a Social Networking pow wow for their authors. Here is a pdf of the presentation.Here's a look at role of the author in pre-internet days...
Rowan Oak
The University of Mississippi has a slick interactive website that lets you explore William Faulkner's long-time home, Rowan Oak.