Curated category
Writers about activism and social change
- Mahatma GandhiMohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on the 2nd of October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula. His father Karamchand Uttamchand…
- VoltaireFrançois-Marie Arouet was born in Paris on the 21st of November 1694. He entered the world as the youngest child of a minor treasury official and a woman…
- Charles DickensOn the 12th of May 1824, twelve-year-old Charles Dickens boarded a small boat to visit his father inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark.
- Stephen KingStephen Edwin King was born on the 21st of September 1947 in Portland, Maine. His father Donald Edwin King worked as a traveling vacuum salesman after…
- 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…
- Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up as the second of six children to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and…
- Herman MelvilleHerman Melville was born on the 1st of August 1819, in New York City. He entered the world as the third child of Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort.
- T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot was born on the 26th of September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He lived at a house on Locust Street for his first sixteen years before…
- 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…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheJohann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on the 28th of August 1749 in a large house on Großer Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, had…
- 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…
- Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau was born on the 28th of June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva. His mother Suzanne Bernard died nine days after his birth from puerperal…
- René DescartesRené Descartes entered the world on the 31st of March 1596 in La Haye en Touraine, France. His mother Jeanne Brochard died just days after his birth while…
- Leo TolstoyCount Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy entered the world at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate located southwest of Tula and south of Moscow.
- Victor HugoVictor-Marie Hugo was born on the 26th of February 1802 in Besançon, a city in eastern France. His father Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo served as a general…
- Karl MarxKarl Marx entered the world on the 5th of May 1818 at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father Heinrich Marx worked as a…
- Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory.
- John MiltonJohn Milton was born on the 9th of December 1608 in Bread Street, London. His father, also named John Milton, had moved to London around 1583 after being…
- Arthur MillerArthur Asher Miller was born on the 17th of October 1915 in Harlem, Manhattan. He grew up as the second child of Augusta and Isidore Miller.
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky was born on the 7th of December 1928 in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish…
- Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard was born on the 3rd of December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. His father Paul Godard worked as a Swiss physician while his mother…
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was born on the 28th of November 1820 in Barmen, Prussia. He grew up in a house surrounded by factories and workers' tenements within the…
- 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…
- Max WeberMaximilian Carl Emil Weber entered the world on the 21st of April 1864 in Erfurt, Province of Saxony. His family moved to Charlottenburg three years later.
- David AttenboroughDavid Frederick Attenborough was born on the 8th of May 1926 in Isleworth, Middlesex. He grew up in College House on the campus of University College…
- Maxim GorkyAlexei Maximovich Peshkov adopted the pseudonym Maxim Gorky in 1892. The name meant bitter, reflecting his simmering anger about life in Russia and a…