Carl August Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figu...

Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" Zelle MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a member of the Frisian minority from the Netherlands, and was an exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy and executed by fir...

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a prolific British crime writer, journalist and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and countless articles in newspapers and journals. Over 160 films have been made of his novels, more than any othe...

John Buchan is most famous for The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, and his thrillers and short stories are all in print today. The list of his published books is well over a hundred in number, and only about 40 of these are fiction....

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best remembered as the creator of the world famous character of Tarzan, one of the indispensable icons of popular culture. Burroughs also published science fiction and crime novels. In 1912 Burroughs's breakthrough n...

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, social critic, philanthropist and essayist, lauded principally for a series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the a...

Albert Schweitzer was a French-German theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at this ti...

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. In the post-World War I years, Lowell was largely forgotten, but the women's moveme...

Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomen...

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was a Jewish Austrian composer, music theorist, and painter. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. By 1938, with the rise of the...

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work...

Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer best known for coining the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics. In his lifetime, though associated with the Symbolist movement, Jarry was best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which...

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov, one of the most famous of Russian composers. Rachmaninov's music is considered Romantic while bearing traces of typically Russian themes and style of composition. Although banned in Soviet Russia for more tha...

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Scriabin, who was influenced early in his life by the works of Frédéric Chopin, composed works that are characterised by a highly tonal idiom (these works are associated wi...

Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugène-Georges Proust was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in French À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of...