Curated playlist
20th-century American memoirists
- 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…
- 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…
- Richard NixonRichard Nixon was the only president in American history to resign from the office he held. On the 9th of August, 1974, he stepped away from the presidency under the weight of the Watergate scandal, a crisis rooted in a break-in at the…
- Clark GableClark Gable arrived in Hollywood as an extra in 1924, barely able to afford a meal, and left it more than three decades later as the man the American Film Institute ranked seventh among the greatest male screen legends of classical…
- Katharine HepburnKatharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, a record no one else has matched. She wore trousers before women commonly did. She refused autographs, shunned the publicity machine, and once wrestled a camera from a…
- 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…
- Joan CrawfordJoan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, built one of the most tenacious careers in Hollywood history from a foundation of almost nothing. Her father abandoned the family when she was ten months old. Her schooling…
- Bette DavisBette Davis died on the 6th of October, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, too weak to make the journey home after her cancer returned during a visit to Spain. Her tombstone reads: "She did it the hard way." That…
- 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,…
- Jack L. WarnerJack Leonard Warner ran Warner Bros. Studios for more than half a century, longer than any other pioneering Hollywood mogul. His career began with a pawned horse and a borrowed chair, and it ended with an estate valued at $15 million and a…
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, just hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on the 22nd of November 1963. The photograph of that moment, taken…
- 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…
- Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States not by winning an election, but by walking into a room where Eleanor Roosevelt told him her husband was dead. He had been vice president for only 82 days. He had never been…
- Malcolm XMalcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm on the 21st of February 1965, shortly after gunmen opened fire on him at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. The autopsy identified 21 gunshot wounds. He was 39 years old. In the hours after the…
- Carrie FisherCarrie Frances Fisher once wrote that no matter how she died, she wanted it reported that she had drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra. After her death in December 2016, several news outlets honored the request. That single line…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- 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 himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- Timothy LearyTimothy Francis Leary was arrested 36 times between the 1960s and 1970s, a record that tells you something about how seriously the American establishment took him. President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America".…