Willem Elsschot was a Flemish writer and poet (pseudonym of Alphonsus Josephus de Ridder). A few of his works have been translated into English. Elsschot published poems in a magazine titled "Alvoorder". His writing took off while he worked...

Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his...

Anna Pavlovna was a Russian ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th century. She is widely regarded as one of the finest classical ballet dancers in history and was most noted as a Principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and t...

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music. Bartók is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the field of e...

Cecil Blount DeMille was an Academy Award-winning American film director. He was famous in the first half of the 20th century, known for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies. DeMille directed dozens of silent films, including Param...

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for...

Paul Klee was a Swiss German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color...

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...