Literary Birthday – 10 September – Carl Van Doren

Carl Van Doren was born 10 September 1885, and died 18 July 1950.

Five Carl Van Doren Quotes

1. Yes, it’s hard to write, but it’s harder not to.
2. The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work.
3. The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted . . . . Some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.
4. A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
5. The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.
6. The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

Carl Van Doren was an American critic and writer. He won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Benjamin Franklin.

Source: Louis Edward Nollau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carl-Van-Doren.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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