Curated playlist
1897 births
- Ramdas GandhiRamdas Gandhi was born on the 4th of May 1897 in the British Colony of Natal, the third son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. He grew up in the shadow of one of the most consequential figures in modern history. Yet his life was not…
- William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner spent most of his writing life within a few square miles of Lafayette County, Mississippi, yet the fictional world he built from that patch of earth would reshape literature across three continents. He was born on the 25th…
- Joseph GoebbelsOn the evening of the 1st of May 1945, Joseph Goebbels walked up from an underground bunker into the garden of the Reich Chancellery and ended his life. Hours earlier he had served a single day as Chancellor of Germany, named to the post…
- Adolf HeusingerAdolf Heusinger was standing next to Adolf Hitler when the bomb went off on the 20th of July 1944. The man who planted it, Claus von Stauffenberg, had placed an explosive device beneath the conference table at Hitler's Wolf's Lair…
- Henri FrankfortHenri Frankfort was born in Amsterdam on the 24th of February 1897, into a liberal Jewish family, and he would spend his life crossing the boundaries that separated ancient worlds. His name appears in footnotes to some of the most…
- Georges BatailleGeorges Bataille was born on the 10th of September 1897 in Billom, a small town in the Auvergne region of France, and by the time he died on the 8th of July 1962 he had spent a lifetime writing things that made people deeply uncomfortable.…
- Fletcher PrattIn February 1916, an Associated Press dispatch reported the arrest of Murray Fletcher Pratt in Geneva, New York. Pratt was a college student at the time. He had broken into cash drawers across town on a series of midnight runs, netting…
- Wilhelm ReichWilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of November 1957 in a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Between those two dates he published…
- Ole ColbjørnsenOle Colbjørnsen was born on the 30th of May 1897 in Vegårshei, a small municipality in Aust-Agder, Norway. He would go on to help reshape an entire nation's relationship with economic planning. Before he was 18, he had already passed his…
- Károly KerényiKároly Kerényi handed back his passport in 1944, the moment German forces entered Hungary and installed a right-wing government. Overnight, the Hungarian scholar became a stateless political refugee, settled in Switzerland with no official…
- Naomi MitchisonNaomi Mitchison was born in Edinburgh on the 1st of November 1897 and died at Carradale on the 11th of January 1999 at the age of 101. In that century-spanning life she wrote more than 90 books, stood as a parliamentary candidate, smuggled…
- Hans SpeidelHans Speidel was the man who answered the phone when Hitler ordered Paris destroyed. On the 26th of August 1944, Alfred Jodl, chief of staff of the German high command, rang Field Marshal Walter Model with instructions to begin targeting…
- G. Wilson KnightG. Wilson Knight spent decades arguing that Shakespeare's plays contained a hidden architecture of myth and symbol that most readers had never noticed. Born George Richard Wilson Knight in 1897, he was a literary critic who also stepped…
- Marian AndersonMarian Anderson stepped onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, the 9th of April 1939, and opened with "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." More than 75,000 people stood before her. Millions more listened on the radio. She had been…