William Faulkner...

William Faulkner
Born: September 25th, 1897 - Mississippi, U.S.
Died: July 6th, 1962 - Mississippi, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
playwright
poet
essayist


Nobel Prize for Literature 1949
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1955, 1963



Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
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And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
- The Sound and the Fury


I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
- As I Lay Dying

She was the captain of her soul...
- Light in August

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
- A Fable

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief
- The Wild Palms

...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.
- Intruder in the Dust

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
- Absalom, Absalom!

Upton Sinclair...

Upton Sinclair
Born: September 20th, 1878 - Maryland, U.S.
Died: November 25th, 1968 - New Jersey, U.S.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - 1943


novelist
journalist
political and social activist


The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.
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The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.
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There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.
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They use everything about the hog except the squeal.
- The Jungle 


Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.
- The Profits of Religion

Mary Oliver...

Mary Oliver
Born: September 10, 1935 - Ohio, U.S.


poet (Pulitzer Prize for poetry)


When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

 I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
 to be blessed.
- Evidence: Poems

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
 It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
- Thirst 

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
- A Poetry Handbook

Justin (Joe) Kaplan...

Justin Kaplan
Born: September 5th, 1925 - NY, U.S.
Died: March 2nd, 2014 - Massachusetts, U.S.


biographer
- Mr Clemens and Mark Twain (1967) - Pulitzer Prize


Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.

There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.
- when general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations - 1993 (16th edition)

For years I assumed the shape of a literary biography must imitate the shape of the subject’s life. Then I realized it was more significant to recreate the life’s density, texture, and meaning. 
- 1981 Boston Globe interview - see HERE

I really feel there’s a vaguely religious aspect to biography. Especially with creative people, you’re dealing with sort of a mystery.
- in an interview with Rob Couteau, Kaplan talks about his biography of Walt Whitman