Curated playlist
1890 births
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died on the 15th of March 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island, virtually unknown to the reading public. He was 46 years old, hospitalized with terminal cancer of the small intestine, and had spent his final weeks keeping a…
- Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie holds a record no living novelist can claim: more than two billion copies of her books sold, making her the best-selling fiction writer of all time. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, and her…
- Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight David Eisenhower drafted a message he hoped no one would ever read. On the eve of the D-Day landings on the 6th of June 1944, he wrote a short statement taking full personal responsibility if the assault on Normandy failed. 'If any…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single…
- Charles de GaulleCharles de Gaulle was born on the 22nd of November 1890 in Lille, the third of five children in a devoutly Catholic, conservative, and monarchist household. He died on the 9th of November 1970, leaving his presidential memoirs unfinished.…
- Karel ČapekKarel Čapek died on Christmas Day, 1938, of pneumonia, and the Gestapo did not even know he was gone. Months later, Nazi agents arrived at his Prague home to arrest him. They found only his wife. That gap between the power of a regime and…
- TaixuTaixu once told an audience that a single drop of water contains eighty four thousand microbes. He offered that as proof that worlds exist within worlds too small to see. Taixu was a Buddhist monk in China, a modernist who wanted to remake…
- Maurice Podoloff"I was born on either Aug. 18 or Aug. 31," Maurice Podoloff once said, "and it was somewhere in Ukraine, possibly near Odessa." He added that record-keeping in Russia had simply not been reliable in those days. That uncertain beginning…
- Allan NevinsAllan Nevins grew up on a farm in Camp Point, Illinois, the son of a stern Presbyterian farmer of Scottish descent and a German-heritage mother named Emma. He would go on to publish more than 50 books, supervise over 100 doctoral…
- Boris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the kitchen door waiting to rush illustrations to a literary journal in St. Petersburg.…
- Adolphe MenjouAdolphe Menjou was voted Best Dressed Man in America nine times. That statistic tells you something important about how the world saw him - not just as an actor, but as an ideal. His career stretched across five decades, from silent…
- E. Merton CoulterE. Merton Coulter served as the first president of the Southern Historical Association in 1934. He edited the Georgia Historical Quarterly for fifty years. He was a professor at the University of Georgia for six decades and chaired its…
- El LissitzkyEl Lissitzky spent his final months of 1941 ill in Moscow, his tuberculosis now in its gravest stage. Yet he kept working. One of his last pieces was a propaganda poster calling on the Soviet people to build more tanks for the fight…