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...

The Suez Canal, also known by the nickname "The Highway to India", is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows water...

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens was an English architect known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. He designed many English country houses, war memorials and public buildings. In his biogra...

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarde...

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. He was a designer in the post impressionist movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had considerable influe...

Edward Sheriff Curtis was a photographer of the American West and of Native American peoples. In 1906 J.P. Morgan offered Curtis $75,000 to produce a series on the North American Indian. It was to be in 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs....

(John) Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was an American artist and sculptor famous for creating the monumental presidents' heads at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, the famous carving on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, as well as other public works of...

Charles Louis Eugène Koechlin was a French composer, teacher and writer on music. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Seba...

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures, 532 of which were completed. Wright believed in designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its e...