Curated category
20th-century atheists
- George OrwellEric Arthur Blair arrived in the world on the 25th of June 1903 within a house in Motihari, Bengal Presidency. His family belonged to what he called the…
- Orson WellesGeorge Orson Welles was born the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father Richard Head Welles made a fortune inventing a bicycle lamp before…
- Nikita KhrushchevNikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born on the 15th of April 1894 in Kalinovka, a small village in western Russia. His parents were poor peasants who…
- Keira KnightleyKeira Christina Knightley was born on the 26th of March 1985 in the southwestern London suburb of Teddington. Her father Will Knightley worked as a stage…
- Katharine HepburnKatharine Houghton Hepburn was born on the 12th of May 1907 in Hartford Connecticut. Her mother Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn led the Connecticut Woman…
- Marilyn MonroeNorma Jeane Mortenson was born on the 1st of June 1926, at Los Angeles General Hospital in the Boyle Heights neighborhood.
- Virginia WoolfAdeline Virginia Woolf entered the world on the 25th of January 1882 within a grand house in South Kensington, London. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, a…
- Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin signed his articles "K. Stalin", an alias drawn from the Russian word for steel, translated as "Man of Steel." The man who chose it was born…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on the 11th of November 1922. He descended from a long line of German Americans whose family fortune rested on the…
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in Paris. His family moved back to Kraków, Poland, in early 1937. Two years later, Nazi Germany invaded…
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was born on the 21st of June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre and Anne-Marie Schweitzer.
- Emma ThompsonEmma Thompson arrived at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1977 to study English. Her father Eric Thompson had been a beloved children's television writer known…
- Che GuevaraOn the 14th of May 1928, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born into an upper-class family in Rosario, Argentina. His father, a staunch supporter of…
- Mao ZedongMao Zedong was born to a peasant family in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan, on the 26th of December 1893, near the end of the Qing dynasty. His father beat him.
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, a working-class town in French Algeria, to a mother who was deaf and illiterate and a father he…
- Benito MussoliniBenito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born on the 29th of July 1883 in Dovia di Predappio, a small town in the province of Forlì.
- Xi JinpingXi Jinping was born on the 15th of June 1953 in Beijing. His father, Xi Zhongxun, served as a high-ranking official in the Communist Party before being…
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger entered the world on the 12th of August 1887 in Vienna. He was the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger, a botanist, and…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Wuppertal, Germany. His father rose from being a poor ribbon-weaver to own a ribbon-making factory.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss was born on the 28th of November 1908 in Brussels. His parents were French Jews who had moved there for his father's work as a portrait…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on the 22nd of April 1870 in Streletskaya Ulitsa, a street in the city of Simbirsk. He grew up as the third child among…
- Alan TuringAlan Turing once chained his tea mug to a radiator pipe at Bletchley Park so it could not be stolen. In the first week of every June he cycled to the office…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916 in a hospital near Petoskey, Michigan. His family lived in the small town of Gaylord where he spent…
- Stephen HawkingStephen William Hawking was born on the 8th of January 1942 in Oxford to Frank and Isobel Eileen Hawking. His mother came from a family of doctors in Glasgow…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov arrived in the United States on the 3rd of February 1923, aboard the RMS Baltic at age three. His family traveled from Petrovichi, Russian SFSR…
- Mátyás RákosiMátyás Rákosi was born Mátyás Rosenfeld on the 9th of March 1892 in Ada, a small village within Bács-Bodrog County. His father József Rosenfeld worked as a…
- Leon TrotskyLev Davidovich Bronstein was born on the 7th of November 1879 into a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farming family in Yanovka, a village in the Kherson…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842. He entered the Page Corps, an elite school for imperial attendants, at age eight after Tsar…
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in Baghdati, Kutais Governorate, Georgia. His father worked as a local forester while his mother managed…
- B. F. SkinnerBurrhus Frederic Skinner was born on the 20th of March 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His father William Skinner worked as a lawyer while his mother…
- Alexandre KojèveAleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov entered the world on the 28th of April 1902 within the borders of the Russian Empire.
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, a country house in Trellech, Monmouthshire, on the 18th of May 1872.
- Jane Ellen HarrisonJane Ellen Harrison was born in Cottingham, Yorkshire on the 9th of September 1850. Her father worked as a timber merchant while her mother died of puerperal…
- A. J. AyerAlfred Jules Ayer entered the world on the 29th of October 1910 in St John's Wood, a district in north west London. His parents were wealthy continental…
- Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling was born on the 28th of February 1901, in Portland, Oregon. His father Herman Henry William Pauling worked as a traveling salesman for the…