Attention book nerds: if you want to see Ernest Hemingway in a dress, look no further. Sure, he’s probably less than a year old and outfitted in his christening garb, but still: Ernest Hemingway in a dress. As you probably know, here at Flavorwire we’re huge literary geeks, and therefore obsessed with all things relating to our favorite authors, be them large or small — and in this case, they’re pretty small. The authors, that is. We’ve collected a series of pictures from the early childhoods of some of our favorite writers, so that we might see the cute and cuddly origins of the literary canon we’ve all come to know and love. Some are instantly recognizable (Patti Smith’s impish grin) and some charmingly apropos (Flannery O’Connor scowling at her picture book) but all of them give us a little peek into the young lives of some of our favorite figures. Click through to see literary luminaries like Plath, Hemingway, Nabokov, Salinger, Joyce and many more when they were still innocent babes, and let us know if you have any other famous authors’ baby pictures to share!
Sylvia Plath [via]
Ernest Hemingway [via]
Vladimir Nabokov [via]
J.D. Salinger (and his older sister Doris), 1920 [via]
Roald Dahl, age eight [via]
Patti Smith [via]
Jack Kerouac [via]
F. Scott Fitzgerald [via]
Flannery O’Connor [via]
James Joyce, age six, 1888 [via]
John Steinbeck, 1907 [via]
Franz Kafka, age 5, 1888 [via]
Agatha Christie [via]
Joseph Conrad, 1863 [via]
Rudyard Kipling [via]