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Curated category

20th-century American essayists

  • Stephen KingStephen King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 on the 19th of June 1999 when a minivan struck him and sent him into a depression in the…
  • Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, into a family where his mother kept his hair long and dressed him in frilly…
  • T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient…
  • 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…
  • Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
  • Ron PaulRon Paul delivered babies for decades in Brazoria County, Texas, and one of those deliveries was famous Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla.
  • Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory.
  • Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson once wrote a line he repeated for the rest of his life. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've…
  • John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. spent his entire life asking a single question: what is music? He was born on the 5th of September, 1912, in Los Angeles, and for nearly…
  • Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous.
  • 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.
  • W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy.
  • Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
  • Ralph EllisonRalph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City, named after the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by a father who hoped his son would grow up…
  • Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and…
  • Jonathan FranzenJonathan Franzen was born on the 17th of August, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and by the time he was in his early forties, he had managed to get his…
  • Paul KrugmanPaul Krugman grew up in Merrick, a hamlet on Long Island, and traces his interest in economics not to a professor or a recession, but to science fiction.
  • Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had…
  • Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about…
  • Jerry FodorJerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best…
  • Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and…
  • Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities…
  • Angela DavisAngela Davis grew up on a street her Birmingham neighbors called "Dynamite Hill" - a name earned through the bombings of homes belonging to middle-class…
  • Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr.
  • Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers…
  • George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…