Curated playlist
1902 births
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a produce market to survive. He later won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- William WylerDirector William Wyler once made Henry Fonda do forty takes of one scene. His only note was the word again.
- Mikhail SuslovA box of index cards with Lenin quotes launched Mikhail Suslov's Soviet career. Stalin promoted him in 1937.
- Allen LaneAllen Lane sold the first Penguin paperbacks from a vending machine. He asked why a good book cost more than soap.
- Meyer LanskyShortly after The Godfather Part II reached theaters in 1974, Meyer Lansky picked up the telephone and called the actor Lee Strasberg. Strasberg had played Hyman Roth, a gangster based on Lansky, and had earned an Oscar nomination for it.…
- Wilbur Kitchener JordanWilbur Kitchener Jordan, who published as W. K. Jordan, lived from 1902 to 1980 and became one of the leading American historians of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His career turned on a question that still feels…
- Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- Ray KrocRay Kroc took the public address microphone in San Diego on the 9th of April 1974 and criticized his own baseball team. The Padres were about to lose their season opener to the Houston Astros, 9-5, and 39,083 fans were watching. Kroc told…
- Charles LindberghCharles Lindbergh stared at a huge field of glowing lights near Paris in May 1927 and took it for a giant industrial complex. He had just flown alone across the Atlantic, and the airfield he was hunting was not on his map. All he knew was…
- Oskar MorgensternOskar Morgenstern was born on the 24th of January 1902 in Görlitz, a town in the Prussian Province of Silesia. According to a rumor, his mother was a daughter of Emperor Frederick III. Whatever the truth of that story, the child grew up…
- Alexandre KojèveAlexandre Kojève wrote a 900-page manuscript for Stalin. Whether it ever reached Moscow remains unknown.
- Albert AnastasiaAlbert Anastasia was born Umberto Anastasio in Calabria, Italy, and died in a barber's chair in Manhattan on the 25th of October 1957. Along the way he collected the nicknames The Earthquake and The One-Man Army. Few figures in American…