Short answers, pulled from the story.
Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian born around 525 BC in Eleusis, near Athens. He is called the father of tragedy because academic knowledge of the dramatic genre begins with his work, and he fundamentally expanded theatre by adding a second actor, making conflict between characters possible for the first time.
Ancient sources attribute between 70 and 90 plays to Aeschylus. Only seven have survived in complete form: The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides), and the disputed Prometheus Bound.
Aeschylus fought at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC alongside his brother Cynegeirus, who was killed in the fighting. He also served at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC and at Plataea in 479 BC. His gravestone commemorates only his military service, with no mention of his plays.
The Oresteia, performed in 458 BC, is the only complete trilogy of ancient Greek plays that survives. It consists of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, and follows the family of Agamemnon from his murder by his wife Clytemnestra through the trial and acquittal of their son Orestes.
Aeschylus died in 456 or 455 BC in the Sicilian city of Gela. Valerius Maximus wrote that an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head, mistaking his bald skull for a rock. Pliny added that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object, though the story may be a later legend.
On the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy quoted Aeschylus in an impromptu speech in Indianapolis, reciting a passage from Agamemnon in Edith Hamilton's translation. After Kennedy was himself assassinated, that quotation from Aeschylus was inscribed on the memorial at his gravesite.