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...

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the Antarctic expedition of 1910–1912 which was the first to reach the South Pole. They arrived at the South Pole on 14 December 1911, 35 days before Scott...

John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the thirtieth President of the United States (1923–1929). A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His...

Louis Blériot was a French aviator, inventor and engineer. In 1909 he completed the first flight across a large body of water in a heavier-than-air craft when he crossed the English Channel, receiving a prize of 1000 British pounds for doin...

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...

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isola...

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces and figures that were not received well during his lifeti...

Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian Democrat (MRP) and an independent political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of Finance and a Foreign Minister, he was...

In 1911, Rietveld started his own furniture factory, while studying architecture. Rietveld designed the 'Red and Blue Chair' in 1918, influenced by the 'De Stijl' movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he beca...

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" house/car, ephemeraliz...

Josef Ganz was a German car designer born in Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Hungary). In 1923, as a young mechanical engineering student, Ganz made his first auto sketches for a car for the masses. This was a small lightweight ca...

Alexander "Sandy" Calder was an abstract painter and sculptor famous for working in wire and originating the dangling, moving artworks known as mobiles. Alexander Calder grew up in a family of artists, but he began his career by studying me...

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway...

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and also won the U.S. National Book Aw...

Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic...