Empowering Writers Since 1999
My First Reading by Walt Whitman From 1824 to ’28 our family lived in Brooklyn in Front, Cranberry and Johnson streets. In the latter my father built a nice house for a home, and afterwards another in Tillary street. We occupied them, one after the other, but they were mortgaged, and we lost them. I…
So from time to time we love finding things like this. It’s a little piece of history, and it makes us chuckle to think that context is everything. We think writers should know history, and I think it makes us feel closer to long dead famous writers who might have experienced a little adversity too….
In 1909 Ambrose Bierce famous for many of his works including An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge wrote a piece of advice to writers titled “Write it Right.” The piece starts with some words of wisdom to the writer and then is followed by a long “
The. time when the intellectual affairs of America could be conducted on a monolingual basis is over. It has been irksome for long. The intellectual life of London is dependent on people who understand the French language about as well as their own. America’s part in contemporary culture is based chiefly
To interest readers is obviously the prime object in all popular writing. The basis of interest in the news story, the special feature article, and the short story is essentially the same. Whatever the average person likes to hear and see, whatever gives him
My old Mayo woman told me one day that something very bad had come down the road and gone into the house opposite, and though she would not say what it was, I knew quite well.
There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere. If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again.
To Mrs. Grover Cleveland, in Washington: Hartford, Nov. 6, 1887. My Dear Madam,—I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. Last night when I was…
An English Critic on Mark Twain An English Critic on Mark Twain: Perhaps the most successful flights of humor of Mark Twain have been descriptions of the persons who did not appreciate his humor at all. We have become familiar with the Californians who were thrilled with terror by his burlesque of a newspaper reporter’s way…
The Function of the Poet by James Russell Lowell This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks…
On Siegfried Sassoon by Robert Nichols Sassoon the Man: In appearance he is tall, big-boned, loosely built. He is clean-shaven, pale or with a flush; has a heavy jaw, wide mouth with the upper lip slightly protruding and the curve of it very pronounced like that of a shrivelled leaf (as I have noticed is common…
Difficulty of Analysis The Human Mind by Percy Bysshe Shelley If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in…
On The Physiology of Laughter by Herbert Spencer Why do we smile when a child puts on a man’s hat? or what induces us to laugh on reading that the corpulent Gibbon was unable to rise from his knees after making a tender declaration? The usual reply to such questions is, that laughter results from…
William Blake and the Imagination by W. B. Yeats There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke…
A College Magazine by Robert Louis Stevenson I All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one…