Curated playlist
Writers from Chicago
- Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway, only 18, carried Italian soldiers to safety despite being seriously wounded by mortar fire.
- Barack ObamaObama rejected a plan to bomb a compound in Pakistan and sent Navy SEALs instead. The 2011 raid killed Osama bin Laden.
- Roger EbertRoger Ebert typed his last blog post two days before he died. He signed off with "I'll see you at the movies."
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow learned he had entered the U.S. illegally as a child when he tried to enlist. He became a citizen in 1941.
- Edgar Rice BurroughsEdgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan after failing as a mine manager and pencil-sharpener wholesaler.
- Walt DisneyIn 1928, Walt Disney lost his hit cartoon rabbit Oswald to Universal. Only Ub Iwerks stayed, and Mickey Mouse followed.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman argued the Federal Reserve let the money supply shrink by one-third between 1929 and 1933.
- John JakesJohn Jakes wrote fiction at night while working as an advertising copywriter. His Kent series sold 55 million copies.
- James WatsonJames Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its…
- Gil Scott-HeronGil Scott-Heron preferred the word "bluesologist" even as critics called him a rap progenitor.
- Michael CrichtonMichael Crichton once submitted a George Orwell essay as his own and got a B-minus.
- Gillian AndersonGillian Anderson was arrested on her graduation night. She had broken into her own high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hoping to glue the locks of its doors shut. Her classmates had voted her "class clown," "most bizarre girl" and "most…
- Gary GygaxGary Gygax grew up hearing Wrigley Field crowds from his bedroom window. He later helped create Dungeons and Dragons.
- James KahnEmergency doctor James Kahn played the doctor who pronounces E.T. dead. He had advised on reviving an alien.
- James BurnhamJames Burnham's 1941 book The Managerial Revolution helped inspire Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.