Tennyson, Cooper, Longfellow, and Other Streets

Last week I was driving through an unfamiliar neighborhood in St Louis looking for a friend’s house, and happened to notice an area with streets named after authors.  I hadn’t thought about Tennyson for a long time.  Or Cooper, or Longfellow, for that matter.

I wondered if kids now learn about them in school or read their works.  My guess is–they don’t.

The way I first learned about famous authors, even before I started school, was through the card game ‘Authors.’  We had a few card games we played quite a bit:  Crazy 8s, Old Maid (how terribly non PC that game is now), and Authors.  I loved all three but Authors was my favorite.  It may have even been the reason I became a passionate reader at an early age. 

With the help of Google, I was able to find the original Authors card game and remind myself of the featured writers. Alcott, Scott, Twain, Dickens, and more. They all looked like such strange, ancient people when I was a kid. They still do. The picture of Alcott in the card game depicted her at about age 25. Not a bit of youth shows in that picture.

I didn’t read everything Wikipedia said about Authors but did see that there had been updates and a few authors had been added. If I were to make up a set of Authors, I would include Jane Austin, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, Burns, Dickens, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Wouk, Michener, Bronte, Woolf, Angelou, Elliot, Shelley, Wharton, Sand, Dinesen, Shute, Hersey, and on and on and on. The deck would probably be so big, no child could hold it. And that list didn’t even include Sci-Fi writers. It could be a separate deck: Bradbury, Heinlein, Cummings, Vonnegut, Huxley, Verne, Clarke, Poe, Shelley, Wells, Asimov.

Interesting to think about. So many wonderful books and writers. Hard to narrow down the selection.

What authors would you include?