Theodosius Dobzhansky was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the modern synthesis. Born in the Russian Empire, Dobzhansky emigrated to the United States in 1927, aged 27.
Werner Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".
GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950)
George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterized by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
C.H. WADDINGTON (1905-1975)
C.H. Waddington was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS (1908-2009)
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology.
ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980)
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
KURT VONNEGUT (1922-2007)
Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987)
James Baldwin was an American writer. He garnered acclaim for his work across several forms, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953; decades later, Time magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005. His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, was published in 1955.
JACK KEROUAC (1922-1969)
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
ADRIENNE RICH (1929-2012)
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century," and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse".
GRACE PALEY (1922-2007)
Paley was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist. Paley wrote three critically acclaimed collections of short stories, which were compiled in the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Collected Stories in 1994.
JAMES DICKEY (1923-1997)
James Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966.
Dickey is best known for his novel Deliverance (1970), which was adapted into the acclaimed 1972 film of the same name.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR (1925-1964)
Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations.
A. R. AMMONS (1926-2001)
Ammons was an American poet and professor of English at Cornell University. Ammons published nearly thirty collections of poems in his lifetime. Revered for his impact on American romantic poetry, Ammons received several major awards for his work, including two National Book Awards for Poetry, one in 1973 for Collected Poems and another 1993 for Garbage.
JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995)
James Merrill was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career.
ROBERT CREELEY (1926-2005)
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997)
Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
FRANK O'HARA (1926-1966)
Frank O'Hara was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
W. S. MERWIN (1927-2019)
W.S. Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology.
JAMES WRIGHT (1927-1980)
His transformation achieved its maximum expression with the publication of the seminal The Branch Will Not Break (1963), which positioned Wright as curious counterpoint to the Beats and New York School and aligned him more with emergent Midwestern neo-surrealist and deep image poetics.