Curated playlist
20th-century American male writers
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his films had collected 46 Academy Award nominations and his name had become an adjective…
- Bob DylanBob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on the 24th of May, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His Hebrew name was Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham. He grew up in a small, close-knit Jewish community, and by the time he reached…
- 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 ground about fourteen feet from the pavement. The driver was distracted by a dog…
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man…
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound together. In 1909 he wrote it plainly. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is…
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life. He died in 1940 believing his life was a failure and his work forgotten. The few critics…
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx on the 30th of November 1935, he has written for film,…
- 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 clothes to match his older sister, aiming for the two to look like twins. That same…
- 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…
- Barack ObamaBarack Obama was born on the 4th of August 1961 at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, making him the only person to become president of the United States who was not born in the contiguous 48 states. His…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- Tennessee WilliamsTennessee Williams wrote in his will that he wanted to be sewn into a canvas sack and dropped into the sea at the exact spot where his idol, the poet Hart Crane, had died. His brother ignored that wish entirely and buried him in St. Louis.…
- 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 etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
- James M. McPhersonJames M. McPherson once said that a historian's job is to cut through the myths a people tell about itself, and get closer to reality. That belief runs through more than five decades of writing about the American Civil War. It helped earn…
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin Tarantino was born on the 27th of March 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a mother who let him watch R-rated films as a child and a father he never met. By his late twenties, he would be handing a barely formatted screenplay to a…
- Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on the 14th of October 1912, while on his way to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee. The bullet passed through his eyeglass case and a 50-page folded copy of his speech before lodging in his chest…
- 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…
- David LynchDavid Lynch was born on the 20th of January 1946 at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, Montana, the son of a USDA research scientist and an English-language tutor. He died on the 16th of January 2025, four days before what would have been…
- Henry JamesHenry James was born on the 15th of April 1843 at 21 Washington Place in Manhattan, into a family that would produce two other towering figures in American thought: his brother William, who became a philosopher and psychologist, and his…
- Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting a private screening of his final film for his family and its stars. Between those…
- Wes AndersonWes Anderson grew up in Houston, Texas, making silent films on his father's Super 8 camera, casting his brothers and friends as the talent. His first ambition, he has said, was not to direct movies at all but to become a writer. That early…
- George LucasGeorge Lucas was nearly killed before he ever made a film. On the 12th of June 1962, a few days before his high school graduation in Modesto, California, another driver broadsided his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina, flipping the car…
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion…
- James StewartJames Stewart gave away his only competitive Academy Award. He won Best Actor for the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, then handed the statuette to his father, who set it in the window of the family hardware store in Indiana,…
- 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…
- Jon ParelesJon Pareles was born in 1953 within the quiet borders of Connecticut. His early life unfolded through the keys of a piano and the mouthpiece of a jazz flute. He carried these instruments into his college years at Yale University, where he…
- Jack KerouacJack Kerouac learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens, because the language of his Lowell, Massachusetts home was French. His parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were French Canadians, and around the house the…
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a local produce market to survive. During the Great Depression, he and his first wife lived on fish and crabs he gathered from the sea, vegetables from his garden, and welfare when those sources failed.…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam, New York. His father had been a horse trader in Russia and became a ragman in…
- Ron PaulRon Paul delivered babies for decades in Brazoria County, Texas, and one of those deliveries was famous Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla. That detail captures something essential about the man: a doctor who never quite left medicine…
- Andy WarholAndy Warhol died at 6:31 in the morning on the 22nd of February 1987, in a private room at New York Hospital, from a sudden cardiac arrhythmia following what his doctors had considered a routine gallbladder procedure. He was 58 years old.…
- Dr. SeussTheodor Seuss Geisel was born on the 2nd of March, 1904, on Fairfield Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, within walking distance of a road called Mulberry Street. He would spend decades becoming one of the best-selling children's…
- Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert walked to the podium at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, stood a few yards from President George W. Bush, and spent the next several minutes roasting both the administration and the assembled press…
- Raymond ChandlerRaymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959, having spent much of the intervening years doing almost everything except what he would become famous for. He was a civil servant, a tennis racket stringer, a fruit…
- Langston HughesLangston Hughes died on the 22nd of May 1967, and beneath the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, his ashes rest under an African cosmogram titled Rivers. At the center of that design is a single line…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter than the people who built them? Born on the 2nd of October 1944, Vinge was a…
- Roger EbertRoger Ebert typed his last blog post two days before he died on the 4th of April 2013, signing off with words that could have come from any of his 46 years of reviews: "I'll see you at the movies." He had spent his final months writing…
- Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July,…
- 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…
- Jim MorrisonJim Morrison was found dead in a Paris bathtub on the morning of Saturday, the 3rd of July, 1971. He was 27 years old. No doctor had been called. No autopsy would be performed. The cause of death listed as heart failure was a placeholder,…
- 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. He would go on to become one of the defining voices in modernist literature, a tireless champion of writers like…
- Bruce LeeBruce Lee was born in San Francisco on the 27th of November, 1940, during the hour of the Dragon, in the year of the Dragon. That alignment of the Chinese zodiac was not lost on the family. His mother named him Lee Jun-fan, a name she…
- 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 always worked for me." That sentence, equal parts confession and dare, fits the man…
- Jack LondonJack London was born on the 12th of January, 1876, in a San Francisco neighborhood that would later burn to the ground in the earthquake of 1906. He died forty years later, on the 22nd of November, 1916, on a sleeping porch of a cottage on…
- Irving ThalbergIrving Thalberg was twenty years old when Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, told him to take charge of the entire Los Angeles studio. In shock, Thalberg replied, "I'm what?" The young man already carried a death sentence. As…
- 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 eight decades he pursued an answer so radical it would alienate friends, baffle…
- William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film. The budget had ballooned from $7 million to $15 million, and everyone on the lot knew that if the picture failed,…
- Ralph BakshiRalph Bakshi was born on the 29th of October 1938 in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, into a Krymchak Jewish family, and by the time he was a teenager in Brooklyn he was digging through trash cans for comic books. That detail matters. It tells…