Curated category
Princeton University alumni
- 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.
- Andrew Fleming WestAndrew Fleming West spent much of his life fighting for something Princeton did not yet have: a residential home for its graduate students.
- Emi NakamuraEmi Nakamura's grandfather, Guy Orcutt, was an economist. Her parents, Alice Nakamura and Masao Nakamura, were economists too.
- Raymond L. GarthoffRaymond Leonard Garthoff spent nearly eight decades inside the machinery of American foreign policy, trying to understand what the Soviet Union actually…
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war…
- 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.
- Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill died the same way he was born: in a hotel room. As he whispered his last words at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston on the 27th of November 1953…
- John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles died on the 24th of May, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having resigned as Secretary of State just weeks earlier as bone…
- Allen NewellAllen Newell was born on the 19th of March 1927, and by the time he died on the 19th of July 1992, he had helped build the intellectual foundations of an…
- Thích Nhất HạnhThich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao on the 11th of October 1926, in the ancient capital of Hue in central Vietnam. He died there too, on the 22nd of…
- Edmund WilsonEdmund Wilson Jr. sent a postcard. Not to a friend, not to an editor, but to strangers who wrote asking for his time. The card listed, in exhaustive detail…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and…
- Mark GranovetterMark Granovetter stood at the front of Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City, New Jersey, on a day in January 1961. He was the valedictorian of his class…
- James BakerJames Addison Baker III was born on the 28th of April 1930 at 1216 Bissonnet Street in Houston, Texas, into a family that had shaped the city's legal…
- 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…
- 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…
- Oliver Hart (economist)Oliver Hart walked into a courtroom not to give testimony about a crime, but to explain what it means to truly own something.
- Michael E. BrownMichael E. Brown grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, in the shadow of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and went on to become the astronomer who dismantled…
- Dario AmodeiDario Amodei was born in San Francisco, California, in 1983. His father Riccardo worked as an Italian-American leather craftsman.
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done…
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical…
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth…
- 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.
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase…
- Gilbert PlassGilbert Norman Plass stood at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1942. He worked as an associate physicist during those critical…
- George NolfiGeorge Nolfi was finishing his PhD dissertation at UCLA in 1997 when he sold his first speculative script, Pathfinder, in a three-studio bidding war.
- James BurnhamJames Burnham was born in Chicago on the 22nd of November 1905, the son of an English railroad executive, and he died on the 28th of July 1987 in Kent…
- Clifford AndoClifford Ando was born in 1969, and by the time he reached Princeton University as an undergraduate, he was already drawn to a world two millennia removed…
- Charles RosenCharles Welles Rosen was born on the 5th of May, 1927, in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant architect and a semiprofessional actress who…