Classic Articles on Writing

Classic articles on writing art some of the most interesting and telling works by past authors. Here you will find articles from the past by authors that range from the famous to the obscure.

Fenimore Cooper Sucks at Writing by Mark Twain

by Mark Twain It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and…

THE POETIC PRINCIPLE by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was born in Boston, the child of actors who died while he was very young. He was adopted by a Virginian gentleman, Mr. John Allan,

I Am Not An Animal Expert! by Jack London

by Jack London This is one of our historical articles from writers that we just had to publish. Jack London, one of our most beloved American writer's seems to have…

Shakespeare Sucks! by Leo Tolstoy

(or Shakespeare not a Great Genius) I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after…

Walt Whitman on the Significance of Edgar Allan Poe

n diagnosing this disease called humanity—to assume for the nonce what seems a chief mood of the personality and writings of my subject

Interview with Mark Twain

This interview is from Hartford Daily Courant from May 30th 1888. Twain would have been 53 years old. He had just finished a new book. A reporter for THE COURANT…

Mark Twain on First Getting Published (1906)

My experiences as an author began early in 1867. I came to New York from San Francisco in the first month of that year and presently Charles H. Webb, whom…

What does it mean to be a poet? by William Wordsworth

Born in 1770; died in 1850; graduated from Cambridge in 1791; traveled on the Continent in 1790-92; settled at Grasmere in 1799; married Mary Hutchinson in 1802; settled at Rydal Mount in 1813; traveled in Scotland

When I Met Oscar Oscar Wilde by W. B. Yeats

by W. B. Yeats My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all…

Mark Twain’s Letter to Mrs. Grover Cleveland

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…

Of Ambition by Francis Bacon

by Francis Bacon AMBITION is like choler; which is an humor that maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring, if it be not stopped. But if it be…

A College Magazine by Robert Louis Stevenson

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…

France by Gertrude Stein

Likely and more than evenly, unevenly and not unlikely, very much that and anyway more, this is the left over method. There is nothing left because if it were left…

About War Poetry by George Herbert Clarke (1917)

by George Herbert Clarke (1917) Because man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods.…

Of Love by Francis Bacon

THE stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but…

OLD POETS by Walt Whitman

Poetry (I am clear) is eligible of something far more ripen'd and ample, our lands and pending days, than it has yet produced from any utterance old or new. Modern…

THE WRITER HIMSELF by Robert Saunders Dowst

by Robert Saunders Dowst Critical Faculty—Cultivation of Genius—Observation and Information—Open-mindedness—Attitude Toward Life—Prejudice and Provincialism—The Social Question—Reading—Imagination. Accessible as are the data of the fiction writer, the facts and possibilities of…

Every Writer