Curated category
American male non-fiction writers
- Albert EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that…
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade.
- 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…
- 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.
- Ronald ReaganRonald Wilson Reagan was born on the 6th of February 1911 in a rented apartment above a bakery in Tampico, Illinois, the younger son of a dreaming salesman…
- George H. W. BushGeorge Herbert Walker Bush carried a question with him for most of his adult life. Shot down over the Pacific in 1944, watching both crewmates die while he…
- 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…
- Jay-ZJay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter on the 4th of December 1969, in Brooklyn, New York City, and grew up in the Marcy Houses, a public housing project in the…
- James M. McPhersonJames Munro McPherson arrived in the world on the 11th of October 1936. His birthplace was Valley City, North Dakota. This small town shaped his early years…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- Ron PaulRon Paul delivered babies for decades in Brazoria County, Texas, and one of those deliveries was famous Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla.
- Don H. DoyleDon H. Doyle earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Davis before pursuing a doctorate at Northwestern University.
- Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter was born on the 1st of October 1924, in the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia, where his mother worked as a registered nurse.
- Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert walked to the podium at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, stood a few yards from President George W.
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
- 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…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge published his first short story, "Apartness", in the June 1965 issue of the British magazine New Worlds. He had just received his B.S.
- 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…
- Howard Marks (investor)Howard Stanley Marks was born in 1946 and raised in Queens, New York. His family was ethnically Jewish, yet he grew up as a Christian Scientist.
- David A. BellDavid Avrom Bell was born in New York City in 1961, into a family that thought seriously about ideas for a living. His father was the sociologist Daniel Bell.
- 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.
- 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.
- Buzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on the 21st of July 1969 (UTC), nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong first touched the surface.
- 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…
- Terrence MalickTerrence Malick graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in 1965, won a Rhodes Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford, then walked away from the…
- Seymour DrescherSeymour Drescher was born in 1934 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were Polish Jewish immigrants who brought their history to American soil.
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those…
- Frank Lloyd WrightFrank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. He was born on the 8th of June 1867, yet he insisted throughout…
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley was born on the 24th of March 1733 in Birstall, near Batley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of English Dissenters who…
- 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.
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before.
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to…
- Tom ShoneTom Shone spent five years as the Sunday Times film critic, from 1994 to 1999, sitting in darkened cinemas and wrestling with questions that most critics of…
- Kenneth PomeranzKenneth Pomeranz asked a question that historians had been avoiding for centuries: why did industrialization happen in Europe, and not in China?
- Henry Edward KrehbielHenry Edward Krehbiel spent more than forty years as the chief music critic of The New York Tribune, and in all that time he never stopped picking fights.
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society.
- Wally SchirraWally Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in all three of America's first crewed space programs: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
- JD VanceJames David Vance was born James Donald Bowman on the 2nd of August 1984, in Middletown, Ohio. He grew up in a home marked by poverty and abuse while his…
- Tupac ShakurTupac Amaru Shakur was born on the 16th of June 1971, in East Harlem, Manhattan, not yet carrying the name the world would know him by.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day.
- John A. GarratyJohn Arthur Garraty was born on the 4th of July in 1920. He earned his undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College in 1941.
- 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…
- Joseph CampbellJoseph Campbell once told a packed lecture hall that if you follow your bliss, a track that has been there all the while will open up beneath your feet.
- Arnold SchwarzeneggerArnold Alois Schwarzenegger arrived in the United States in October 1968 at age 21, speaking little English and carrying little money.
- Kirk W. JohnsonKirk Wallace Johnson was born in West Chicago, Illinois. His father served as a Republican State Representative and Senator.
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia.