blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

If you spend your entire life writing, it makes sense to make your last words count. Mark Twain recommended employing one's final breath in a deliberate, dignified message. Death is too important an occasion for improvisation or whimsy. Twain wrote, “There is hardly a case on record where a man came to his last moment unprepared and said a good thing — hardly a case where a man trusted to that last moment and did not make a solemn botch of it and go out of the world feeling absurd." After all, no author ought to die failing in the very thing he or she made a living perfecting. Below, there are numerous examples of writers' last words. Some, you'll find, are more poetic than others.

It’s 1876 and two of America’s most revered writers have decided to collaborate on what turned out to be one of the most disastrous plays in American dramatic work – and one that would severely damage a budding literary friendship.

Have you ever thought about taking a trip to Iceland? If you fly into Reykjavík, you’re only a short drive from Gljúfrasteinn, the home of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldór Laxness. Laxness was born in 1902 in Reykjavík, and he traveled through Europe in his 20s before settling down in Iceland. Some of the author’s most prominent works include The Great Weaver from Kashmir (1927), Independent People (1935), The Atom Station (1948), The Fish Can Sing (1957), and Under the Glacier (1968). A short while ago, we took a tour of his home and learned more about Laxness’s possessions, writing habits, and deep love for the landscape of his country.

The Brontës remain one of history's most famous literary families. Of the six siblings, two died during childhood. The remaining three sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, became published authors during their lifetimes. Although all three died young, their writings have endured as literary classics. How well do you know the lives and works of this legendary family? Take a moment to test your knowledge with the following quiz:

What is resistance literature? Many academics link the term with early work on postcolonialism. For instance, world literature scholars might point you to Barbara Harlow’s seminal work, Resistance Literature (1987), which discusses the ways in which fiction can help us to think through the struggle against colonial and imperial forces outside the narrowly defined Western world. But can we also give the term other meanings? While imaginative literature that engages with the struggle against colonialism is of great significance to any thinking about power and inequality, we might also think a bit further back to World War II. While their works might not necessarily fall under a rubric of resistance literature, we’d like to highlight some of the resistance writers who took up textual arms against the Axis powers.

If you want to learn more about South Africa through fiction, where should you start? The country has a rich modern literary history, including two Nobel Prize winners: Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Much of the imaginative literature that has sprung from South Africa reflects, in large part, the discrimination and violence of the country’s apartheid past. From depicting realistic representations of Johannesburg to novels reenvisioning the nation with alternate histories, the best books on South Africa allow us to immerse ourselves in the beauty and politics of the now “rainbow nation.”

The perceived connection between suffering and the creation of great literary art is something of a well-worn path. Literary scholars and theorists point to examples throughout the canon of American arts and letters to uphold the notion that great stories are born more often than not of mental, emotional, or existential struggle. Such great authors as Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and more recently, David Foster Wallace are remembered as much for their internal battles as their narrative insights into the human condition. On balance, the jury is still out on the necessity of emotional struggle in the creation of relevant, lasting works of literature, but much less is made of the connection between physical suffering or disability and some of the world’s most influential and prolific authors. It’s a thread these five authors share: a physical malady that took its toll on each writer while inevitably influencing their work and their legacy.

Richard Wright is a giant name in American literature. His novel Native Son (1940) became a bestseller nearly as soon as it was published by Harper & Brothers, just before the United States entered into World War II. With the release of Native Son, Wright also became the wealthiest African American writer in the country. Yet there’s a lot you may not know about Richard Wright and the influence his life and work have had on thinkers of the Civil Rights movement, anti-colonial figures, and fiction writers from across the globe.

In 1979, South African writer Nadine Gordimer gave an interview* with The Paris Review where she discussed at some length the importance of politics and political activism in her work. “But the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people,” Gordimer said. Gordimer is a prime example of a literary activist. Here, we explore her work as well as that of a number of other important writer-activists.

It has often been said that the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson are best experienced as a series of profound quotes strung together.While that may be the case, Henry David Thoreau, one of Emerson’s fellow seminal transcendentalists and the author of Walden (1854) and Cape Cod (1865), has an oeuvre that is equally laden with excellent quotations. “The mass of men,” he says in Walden, his classic rumination on solitude, self-reliance, and nature, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”Sometimes the cure for that desperation, Thoreau’s writing seems to suggest, is an expertly deployed quote.