Curated playlist
1915 births
- Frank SinatraFrancis Albert Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds when he was born on the 12th of December 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. The delivery required forceps, which scarred his left cheek and neck and left lifelong…
- Orson WellesOrson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made, terrified radio listeners…
- Billie HolidayBillie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan on the 7th of April, 1915, died with seventy cents in the bank. She had made a quarter of a million dollars in the three years leading up to her arrest in 1947. She had sold a million copies of a song so…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop…
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. The symmetry was almost too neat for a man who wrote plays about men crushed by the weight of their…
- Paul SamuelsonPaul Samuelson stood at a lectern in a University of Chicago classroom on the 2nd of January, 1932, and later said that was the exact moment he was born as an economist. He was sixteen years old. The lecture that morning was on Thomas…
- Evgeny LifshitzEvgeny Lifshitz was the second of only 43 people ever to pass Lev Landau's Theoretical Minimum examination. Born on the 21st of February 1915 in Kharkov, Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, Lifshitz came from a Jewish family. The…
- Peter BergmannPeter Gabriel Bergmann was born in Berlin on the 24th of March 1915, into a family that would scatter across the globe under the weight of Nazi persecution. His father Max was a biochemist who later became a professor at the Rockefeller…
- Harrison StormsHarrison Allen Storms, Jr. was born on the 15th of July 1915, and by the time he died on the 11th of July 1992, just four days before his birthday, he had helped put human beings on the Moon. He was known inside North American Aviation…
- Jerome WiesnerJerome Wiesner once blurted out "No, that's no good" in front of the press, directly contradicting Wernher von Braun during a presidential visit to Marshall Space Flight Center. It was a breathtaking moment of public defiance from the man…
- Anna SchwartzAnna Jacobson Schwartz spent more than seven decades at one address in the world of ideas: the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City. She arrived there in 1941 and never left. By the time she died in 2012, at the age of 96,…
- Leigh BrackettLeigh Brackett was born on the 7th of December 1915 in Los Angeles, California, and by the time she died in March 1978, she had left her mark on science fiction, crime fiction, Hollywood Westerns, and the Star Wars franchise. She earned…
- Abba EbanAbba Eban stood before the United Nations General Assembly in 1967 and delivered a defence of Israel so finely constructed that Henry Kissinger later said he had never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language.…
- Alan WattsAlan Wilson Watts was born on the 6th of January 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent, into a middle-class household at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 Holbrook Lane, where his father worked as a representative for the London office of the Michelin tyre…
- Georgy SviridovGeorgy Sviridov wrote the piece of music that millions of Soviet citizens heard every evening. Yet most of them never connected it to his name. His score for the 1965 film Time, Forward! supplied the opening theme for Vremya, the nightly…