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Aug 25, 2018 · Cats, like writers, are wilful creatures, who don’t like to be controlled. Most authors are creative introverts and cats fit beautifully into an introvert’s world. As the American author, Andre Norton said, ‘Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns, do not fit themselves into prescribed behaviour, that they are so united to creative people.’
- 20 Literary Quotes About Cats
In fact, there are so many writers who have adored cats that...
- 20 Literary Quotes About Cats
Nov 10, 2020 · The American writer Mary Gaitskill, author of the short story on which the 2002 film Secretary was based, adopted a tiny one-eyed cat in Italy, which she called Gattino. The loss of Gattino affected Gaitskill’s view of love – feline and human –profoundly. Human love she thought was "grossly flawed", often serving as a means of ...
- Mark Twain
- T.S. Eliot
- Ernest Hemingway
- William S. Burroughs
- William Butler Yeats
- Samuel Johnson
- Charles Dickens
- Neil Gaiman
- Patricia Highsmith
- William Carlos Williams
Mark Twain—the great humorist and man of American letters—was also a great cat lover. When his beloved black cat Bambino went missing, Twain took out an advertisement in the New York American offering a $5 reward to return the missing cat to his house at 21 Fifth Avenue in New York City. It describedBambino as “Large and intensely black; thick, vel...
Aside from peppering his high Modernist poetry with allusions to feline friends, T.S. Eliot wrote a book of light verse called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of 15 poems, dedicated to his godchildren, regarding the different personalities and eccentricities of cats. Names like Old Deuteronomy, the Rum Tum Tugger, and Mr. Mistoffe...
Ernest Hemingway and his family initially became infatuated with cats while living at Finca Vigía, their house in Cuba. During the writer's travels, he was gifted a six-toed (or polydactyl) cat he named Snowball. Hemingway liked the little guy so much that in 1931, when he moved into his now-famous Key West home, he let Snowball run wild, creating ...
William S. Burroughs is known for his wild, drug-induced writings, but he had a softer side as well—especially when it came to his cats. He penned an autobiographical novella, The Cat Inside,about the cats he owned throughout his life, and the final journal entry Burroughs wrote before he died referred to the pure love he had for his four pets:
Though not overt, William Yeats’s love for cats can be found in poems like “The Cat and the Moon,” where he uses the image of a cat to represent himself and the image of the moon to represent his muse Maude Gonne, a high society-born feminist and sometime actress who inspired the poet throughout his life. The poem references Gonne’s cat named Minna...
Known to be a general cat lover during his life, this 18th century jack-of-all-trades was immortalized in James Boswell’s proto-biography The Life of Samuel Johnson. In the text, Boswell writes of Johnson’s cat, Hodge, saying, “I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oyste...
One of most important and influential writers in history, Charles Dickens had a soft spot for a few cats. As his daughter recalled, when one cat was in need of some attention, it extinguished the flame on his desk candle. In 1862, he was so upset after the death of his favorite cat, Bob, that he had the feline’s paw stuffed and mounted to an ivory ...
The author of American Gods and The Sandman kept regular updates on his blog of the everyday eccentricities of the group of cats—including Hermione, Pod, Zoe, Princess, and Coconut—that he kept at his house. Though he hasn’t written much about them recently, the love and affection that come across in the postsfrom 2010 and earlier show someone who ...
Patricia Highsmith doesn’t have the friendliest literary reputation around (she once said “my imagination functions better when I don't have to speak with people”). But The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Trainauthor nevertheless found a perfect way to let her imagination function with her many four-legged companions. She did virtually every...
Imagist poet William Carlos Williams also worked as a doctor to supplement his writing career, which would eventually culminate in a 1949 National Book Award for Poetry and a posthumously awarded 1963 Pulitzer Prize. His direct style tried to capture the essence of small moments in everyday life, and it’s no wonder he uses a cat to conjure a simple...
- Sean Hutchinson
- Haruki Murakami. Haruki Murakami is a jazz aficionado and owns a floor-to-ceiling vinyl collection that would make any music lover jealous. In the 1970s, Murakami first shared his obsession for music by opening the Tokyo jazz club Peter Cat, named after one of his pets.
- Jirō Osaragi. The Osaragi Jirō Memorial Museum in Yokohama, Japan is dedicated to the author Jirō Osaragi and features numerous cat ornaments as an integral part of its feline-themed decor.
- Judy Blume. The Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret author adored a calico cat she kept that lived to old age—although the author's most famous cat-centric portrait is a photograph of Blume holding her neighbor's cat.
- Stephen King. The feline protagonists in Stephen King's novels lead haunted lives. In Pet Sematary, King tells a story of loss inspired by his family's own tragic experience with their pet cat Smucky who was hit by a car.
- Arianna Rebolini
- Buzzfeed News Reporter
- Chronicle Books
- Alice Walker. Alice Walker, activist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, spoke about one of her beloved cats in a 2007 interview in the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar.
- Chester Himes. Chester Himes, considered the father of the black American crime novel, wrote stories that mirrored the real-life violence and racism happening in the world around him.
- Doris Lessing. Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize–winning, Iran-born British novelist of books including The Golden Notebook, was raised on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which contributed to her affection for animals, particularly cats.
- Gillian Flynn. With a background in journalism and a childhood filled with books and horror movies (Psycho on repeat), Gillian Flynn was destined to become an author of novels that explore society’s dark undercurrent.
Oct 16, 2017 · Here’s the inside scoop: He gave them illustrious names. Twain owned up to 19 cats at one time, writes Livius Drusus for Mental Floss, “all of whom he loved and respected far beyond whatever ...
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Nov 26, 2018 · A new exhibition at the British Library explores how cats have inspired—and frightened—writers across the centuries . Brigit Katz. ... giving them names like Jellylorum, Pettipaws, ...
