James Thurber Biography [U.S. writer and cartoonist] 1894–1961

Short Brief of full name James Grover Thurber: (born Dec. 8, 1894, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.—died Nov. 2, 1961, New York, N.Y.) U.S. writer and cartoonist. He attended Ohio State University before moving to New York City in 1926. He was on The New Yorker staff from 1927 to 1933 and thereafter remained a leading contributor. His drawings illustrated his first book, Is Sex Necessary? (1929; with E.B. White), and his cartoons became some of the most popular and recognizable in America. In 1940 his failing eyesight forced him to curtail his drawing; by 1952 he had to give it up altogether as his blindness became nearly total. His writings include My Life and Hard Times (1933), Fables for Our Time (1940), and the children's book The 13 Clocks (1950). He is noted for his vision of the befuddled urban man who, like the hero of his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939; film, 1946), escapes into fantasy.

George Bernard Shaw Biography [Irish comic dramatist, literary] 1876 - 1950

Short Story: (born July 26, 1856, Dublin, Ireland—died November 2, 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England) Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.


Early life and career
George Bernard Shaw was the third and youngest child (and only son) of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. Technically, he belonged to the Protestant “ascendancy”—the landed Irish gentry—but his impractical father was first a sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant, and George Bernard grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, which to him was more humiliating than being merely poor. At first tutored by a clerical uncle, Shaw basically rejected the schools he then attended, and by age 16 he was working in a land agent's office.

Shaw developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature as a result of his mother's influence and his visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. In 1872 his mother left her husband and took her two daughters to London, following her music teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, who from 1866 had shared households in Dublin with the Shaws. In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer, and he joined his mother and elder sister (the younger one having died) in London. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. He depended upon his mother's pound a week from her husband and her earnings as a music teacher. He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room, writing novels and reading what he had missed at school, and his evenings in search of additional self-education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities.

His fiction failed utterly. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled Immaturity (1879; published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. His next four novels were similarly refused, as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. Shaw's initial literary work earned him less than 10 shillings a year. A fragment posthumously published as An Unfinished Novel in 1958 (but written 1887–88) was his final false start in fiction.

Despite his failure as a novelist in the 1880s, Shaw found himself during this decade. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist, and tentatively a playwright. He became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through revolution but through “permeation” (in Sidney Webb's term) of the country's intellectual and political life. Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he also contributed two sections.

Eventually, in 1885 the drama critic William Archer found Shaw steady journalistic work. His early journalism ranged from book reviews in the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88) and art criticism in the World (1886–89) to brilliant musical columns in the Star (as “Corno di Bassetto”—basset horn) from 1888 to 1890 and in the World (as “G.B.S.”) from 1890 to 1894. Shaw had a good understanding of music, particularly opera, and he supplemented his knowledge with a brilliance of digression that gives many of his notices a permanent appeal. But Shaw truly began to make his mark when he was recruited by Frank Harris to the Saturday Review as theatre critic (1895–98); in that position he used all his wit and polemical powers in a campaign to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas. He also began writing his own plays.

First plays
When Shaw began writing for the English stage, its most prominent dramatists were Sir A.W. Pinero and H.A. Jones. Both men were trying to develop a modern realistic drama, but neither had the power to break away from the type of artificial plots and conventional character types expected by theatregoers. The poverty of this sort of drama had become apparent with the introduction of several of Henrik Ibsen's plays onto the London stage around 1890, when A Doll's House was played in London; his Ghosts followed in 1891, and the possibility of a new freedom and seriousness on the English stage was introduced. Shaw, who was about to publish The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), rapidly refurbished an abortive comedy, Widowers' Houses, as a play recognizably “Ibsenite” in tone, making it turn on the notorious scandal of slum landlordism in London. The result (performed 1892) flouted the threadbare romantic conventions that were still being exploited even by the most daring new playwrights. In the play a well-intentioned young Englishman falls in love and then discovers that his prospective father-in-law's fortune and his own private income derive from exploitation of the poor. Potentially this is a tragic situation, but Shaw seems to have been always determined to avoid tragedy. The unamiable lovers do not attract sympathy; it is the social evil and not the romantic predicament on which attention is concentrated, and the action is kept well within the key of ironic comedy.

The same dramatic predispositions control Mrs. Warren's Profession, written in 1893 but not performed until 1902 because the lord chamberlain, the censor of plays, refused it a license. Its subject is organized prostitution, and its action turns on the discovery by a well-educated young woman that her mother has graduated through the “profession” to become a part-proprietor of brothels throughout Europe. Again, the economic determinants of the situation are emphasized, and the subject is treated remorselessly and without the titillation of fashionable comedies about “fallen women.” As with many of Shaw's works, the play is, within limits, a drama of ideas, but the vehicle by which these are presented is essentially one of high comedy.

Shaw called these first plays “unpleasant,” because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.” He followed them with four “pleasant” plays in an effort to find the producers and audiences that his mordant comedies had offended. Both groups of plays were revised and published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). The first of the second group, Arms and the Man (performed 1894), has a Balkan setting and makes lighthearted, though sometimes mordant, fun of romantic falsifications of both love and warfare. The second, Candida (performed 1897), was important for English theatrical history, for its successful production at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904 encouraged Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne to form a partnership that resulted in a series of brilliant productions there. The play represents its heroine as forced to choose between her clerical husband—a worthy but obtuse Christian socialist—and a young poet who has fallen wildly in love with her. She chooses her confident-seeming husband because she discerns that he is actually the weaker. The poet is immature and hysterical but, as an artist, has a capacity to renounce personal happiness in the interest of some large creative purpose. This is a significant theme for Shaw; it leads on to that of the conflict between man as spiritual creator and woman as guardian of the biological continuity of the human race that is basic to Man and Superman. In Candida such speculative issues are only lightly touched on, and this is true also of You Never Can Tell (performed 1899), in which the hero and heroine, who believe themselves to be respectively an accomplished amorist and an utterly rational and emancipated woman, find themselves in the grip of a vital force that takes little account of these notions.

The strain of writing these plays, while his critical and political work went on unabated, so sapped Shaw's strength that a minor illness became a major one. In 1898, during the process of recuperation, he married his unofficial nurse, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and friend of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The apparently celibate marriage lasted all their lives, Shaw satisfying his emotional needs in paper-passion correspondences with Ellen Terry, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and others.

Shaw's next collection of plays, Three Plays for Puritans (1901), continued what became the traditional Shavian preface—an introductory essay in an electric prose style dealing as much with the themes suggested by the plays as the plays themselves. The Devil's Disciple (performed 1897) is a play set in New Hampshire during the American Revolution and is an inversion of traditional melodrama. Caesar and Cleopatra (performed 1901) is Shaw's first great play. In the play Cleopatra is a spoiled and vicious 16-year-old child rather than the 38-year-old temptress of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The play depicts Caesar as a lonely and austere man who is as much a philosopher as he is a soldier. The play's outstanding success rests upon its treatment of Caesar as a credible study in magnanimity and “original morality” rather than as a superhuman hero on a stage pedestal. The third play, Captain Brassbound's Conversion (performed 1900), is a sermon against various kinds of folly masquerading as duty and justice.

International importance
In Man and Superman (performed 1905) Shaw expounded his philosophy that humanity is the latest stage in a purposeful and eternal evolutionary movement of the “life force” toward ever-higher life forms. The play's hero, Jack Tanner, is bent on pursuing his own spiritual development in accordance with this philosophy as he flees the determined marital pursuit of the heroine, Ann Whitefield. In the end Jack ruefully allows himself to be captured in marriage by Ann upon recognizing that she herself is a powerful instrument of the “life force,” since the continuation and thus the destiny of the human race lies ultimately in her and other women's reproductive capacity. The play's nonrealistic third act, the “Don Juan in Hell” dream scene, is spoken theatre at its most operatic and is often performed independently as a separate piece.

Shaw had already become established as a major playwright on the Continent by the performance of his plays there, but, curiously, his reputation lagged in England. It was only with the production of John Bull's Other Island (performed 1904) in London, with a special performance for Edward VII, that Shaw's stage reputation was belatedly made in England.

Shaw continued, through high comedy, to explore religious consciousness and to point out society's complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara (performed 1905), Shaw has his heroine, a major in the Salvation Army, discover that her estranged father, a munitions manufacturer, may be a dealer in death but that his principles and practice, however unorthodox, are religious in the highest sense, while those of the Salvation Army require the hypocrisies of often-false public confession and the donations of the distillers and the armourers against which it inveighs. In The Doctor's Dilemma (performed 1906), Shaw produced a satire upon the medical profession (representing the self-protection of professions in general) and upon both the artistic temperament and the public's inability to separate it from the artist's achievement. In Androcles and the Lion (performed 1912), Shaw dealt with true and false religious exaltation in a philosophical play about early Christianity. Its central theme, examined through a group of early Christians condemned to the arena, is that one must have something worth dying for—an end outside oneself—in order to make life worth living.

Possibly Shaw's comedic masterpiece, and certainly his funniest and most popular play, is Pygmalion (performed 1913). It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment's success. The scene in which Eliza Doolittle appears in high society when she has acquired a correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is one of the funniest in English drama. Pygmalion has been both filmed (1938), winning an Academy Award for Shaw for his screenplay, and adapted into an immensely popular musical, My Fair Lady (1956; motion-picture version, 1964).

Works after World War I
World War I was a watershed for Shaw. At first he ceased writing plays, publishing instead a controversial pamphlet, “Common Sense About the War,” which called Great Britain and its Allies equally culpable with the Germans and argued for negotiation and peace. His antiwar speeches made him notorious and the target of much criticism. In Heartbreak House (performed 1920), Shaw exposed, in a country-house setting on the eve of war, the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the war's bloodshed. Attempting to keep from falling into “the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism,” Shaw wrote five linked plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1922). They expound his philosophy of creative evolution in an extended dramatic parable that progresses through time from the Garden of Eden to 31,920.

The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 reawakened within Shaw ideas for a chronicle play about her. In the resulting masterpiece, Saint Joan (performed 1923), the Maid is treated not only as a Catholic saint and martyr but as a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Joan, as the superior being “crushed between those mighty forces, the Church and the Law,” is the personification of the tragic heroine; her death embodies the paradox that humankind fears—and often kills—its saints and heroes and will go on doing so until the very higher moral qualities it fears become the general condition of man through a process of evolutionary change. Acclaim for Saint Joan led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award).

In his later plays Shaw intensified his explorations into tragicomic and nonrealistic symbolism. For the next five years, he wrote nothing for the theatre but worked on his collected edition of 1930–38 and the encyclopaedic political tract “The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism” (1928). Then he produced The Apple Cart (performed 1929), a futuristic high comedy that emphasized Shaw's inner conflicts between his lifetime of radical politics and his essentially conservative mistrust of the common man's ability to govern himself. Shaw's later, minor plays included Too True to Be Good (performed 1932), On The Rocks (performed 1933), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (performed 1935), Geneva (performed 1938), and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). After a wartime hiatus, Shaw, then in his 90s, produced several more plays, including Farfetched Fables (performed 1950), Shakes Versus Shav (performed 1949), and Why She Would Not (1956), which is a fantasy with only flashes of the earlier Shaw.

Impudent, irreverent, and always a showman, Shaw used his buoyant wit to keep himself in the public eye to the end of his 94 years; his wiry figure, bristling beard, and dandyish cane were as well-known throughout the world as his plays. When his wife, Charlotte, died of a lingering illness in 1943, in the midst of World War II, Shaw, frail and feeling the effects of wartime privations, made permanent his retreat from his London apartment to his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence, a Hertfordshire village in which he had lived since 1906. He died there in 1950.

George Bernard Shaw was not merely the best comic dramatist of his time but also one of the most significant playwrights in the English language since the 17th century. Some of his greatest works for the stage—Caesar and Cleopatra, the “Don Juan in Hell” episode of Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan—have a high seriousness and prose beauty that were unmatched by his stage contemporaries. His development of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate, his revivifying the comedy of manners, his ventures into symbolic farce and into a theatre of disbelief helped shape the theatre of his time and after. A visionary and mystic whose philosophy of moral passion permeates his plays, Shaw was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift; the most readable music critic in English; the best theatre critic of his generation; a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects; and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature. By bringing a bold critical intelligence to his many other areas of interest, he helped mold the political, economic, and sociological thought of three generations.

Annie Oakley Biography [Sharpshooter, entertainer] 1860–1926

A short Story of original name Phoebe Anne Moses: Sharpshooter, entertainer. Born on August 13, 1860, in Darke County, Ohio. Annie Oakley is remembered as one of the leading women of the American West, especially known for her talent with a gun. She originally began shooting as a means of helping out her family. This skill turned out to be quite lucrative—she earned more than she could have imagined performing shooting tricks. After beating him in a shooting competition, Annie Oakley married Frank E. Butler, a top shooter and vaudeville performer. The couple started working together with Butler assisting Oakley with her stunning displays of marksmanship.

Annie Oakley became one of the top acts in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885. The couple toured with the show for years, and audiences were wowed by her abilities. She could shoot the ashes off a cigarette and punch a hole in a playing card. Oakley even entertained such royals as Queen Victoria and Kraiser Wilhelm II—and shot a cigarette out of his mouth. Not even a railroad accident in 1901 could slow her down for long. Despite being partially paralyzed, Oakley kept on delighting crowds with her tricks.

After retiring with her husband in the 1910s, Annie Oakley stepped out of the spotlight and pursued such hobbies as hunting and fishing. She died on November 2, 1926. The news of her death saddened the nation and brought forth a wave of tributes. Part of her lasting legacy is the Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946) based on her life story.

Nickolas Muray Biography [Photographer, fencer] 1892–1965

A Short Biography: Photographer, fencer. Born in Zseged, Hungary, on February 15, 1892. A talented photographer, Nickolas Muray is known for his commercial images and for his numerous portraits, of some of the twentieth century’s best-known performers on the stage and screen such as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Fred Astaire. He was also a championship-winning fencer who played on the U.S. team at the 1928 and 1932 Olympic Games. The son of a postal worker, Muray studied sculpture for a time before leaving school to go to work as an engraver.

After spending a few years in Germany, Muray moved to the United States in 1913, knowing about 50 words of English and carrying an International Engravers Certificate. He settled in New York City, finding work as a color separator and engraver for a Brooklyn company. In his own time, Muray began to study photography. Using a shared studio in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, he started to build his own photography business. Landing his first big break, Muray sold a portrait of actress Florence Reed to Harper’s Bazaar in 1920.

Nearly overnight, Muray became an in-demand celebrity photographer, handling assignments from many leading publications. In 1926, Vanity Fair sent him to Europe to photograph the likes of artist Claude Monet and writer George Bernard Shaw. Muray also captured many other famous faces for other projects, ranging from dancer and choreographer Martha Graham to Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, F.D.R. and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Working with public relations manager Edward L. Bernays, he created many iconic commercial images for Bernays' clients, such as Lucky Strike cigarettes. In 1930, he was given a contract with the publishing company behind the Ladies Home Journal, which resulted in his creation of the first natural color commercial photograph to appear in a U.S. magazine the following year.

Around this time, Muray met Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The two developed an on- and off-again relationship that spanned a decade. It outlasted his third marriage to Monica O’Shea, whom he married in 1930. In 1937, Monica divorced Muray on the grounds of cruelty according to a report in The New York Times.

During most of their relationship, Kahlo was married to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera who also had a number of extramarital affairs. When Kahlo divorced Rivera in 1939, Muray hoped that he would be able to marry her. Those hopes were soon dashed—she remarried Rivera the following year. Despite his disappointment, Muray remained on friendly terms with Kahlo. He took numerous portraits and photographs of Kahlo over years, some of which used the Carbro technique, a type of carbon pigment process for making color prints which he perfected.

During his career, Muray took more than 10,000 portraits and did countless commercial photography projects. He worked on advertisements for such companies as General Electric, Sara Lee, American Cyanamid, and Kraft.

In addition to photography, Muray excelled at the sport of fencing. Legend has it that he and artist Jacques La Salle were supposed to fight a duel with rapiers in 1920. On the day of the duel, the two met at the same site where Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr in a similar challenge. In this case, however, their alternates decided against bringing the necessary weapons for the duel, and the artists settled their conflict without any violence, according to The New York Times. While that match never happened, Muray was triumphant in numerous other fencing bouts. He was the U.S. saber champion from 1927-1928. In 1928, Muray competed at the Summer Olympic Games as part of the U.S. fencing team. He made the team again for the 1932 Olympics, which brought home the bronze medal in the team competitions in foil and épée events.

For the rest of his life, Muray remained active in the sport. He died on November 2, 1965, after collapsing during a fencing match at the New York Athletic Club. He was survived by his fourth wife, Margaret Schwab Muray, and their two children, Nicholas Christopher and Mimi.

In 1988, his daughter Mimi donated some of his papers to the Archive of American Art. His work is also part of the photography collection of the George Eastman House. Today, interest in his images remains strong. His portraits of Frida Kahlo are currently being featured in a traveling exhibit. A book published in 2004, titled "I Will Never Forget You...: Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray" by Saloman Grimberg, details their friendship from 1931 to Kahlo's death in 1954. It also serves as a catalog to the exhibition, and is the most thorough reference book to date on Muray's life.

Muray's work has served as inspiration for many later artists, such as Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, and Annie Leibovitz. With his own unique style and innovative techniques, Muray has earned his place in the history of photography.

Paul Tibbets [pilot, B-29 that dropped the first atomic weapon used in war] 1915–2007

Biography: Paul Tibbets, pilot and commander of the B-29 that dropped the first atomic weapon used in war, died Thursday (November 1, 2007 ) at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.

Tibbetts was at the controls of the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945 , when the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Tens of thousands of people were instantly killed. Japan surrendered nine days later, ending World War II.

Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. was born February 23, 1915 , in Quincy, Illinois, the son of Enola Gay and Paul Warfield Tibbets. He was raised in Cedar Rapids , Iowa, where his father was a confections wholesaler.

In 1927, the family moved to Florida. He attended the University of Florida in Gainesville and was an initiated member of the Epsilon Zeta Chapter of Sigma Nu Fraternity in 1934. His parents had wanted him to become a doctor, but he was determined to fly.

In 1937, Tibbets enlisted as a flying cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps at Fort Thomas , Kentucky . He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1938 and received his wings at Kelly Air Force Base in Kelly Field, Texas.

During World War II, Tibbets was named commanding officer of the 340th Bomb Squadron, 97th Heavy Bomb Group flying B-17 Flying Fortresses. He flew more than 25 combat missions over occupied Europe and led the first bombardment missions in support of the North African invasion in Algeria.

Tibbetts returned to the U.S. in March 1943 to test the combat capability of Boeing's new B-29 Super Fortress. In September 1944, he was placed in command of the newly form 509th Composite Group, whose mission was to drop the atomic bomb. He chose Wendover Air Base in Utah for the training.

In March 1945, the 509th moved overseas to Tinian Island in the Marianas chain. On the afternoon of August 5, 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman gave his approval to use the weapons against Japan. At 2:45 a.m. on August 6, the Enola Gay, named after Tibbetts's mother, and its crew of 14 lifted off North Field en route to Hiroshima.

At exactly 8:15:15 a.m. the world's first atomic bomb exploded. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and wounded countless others. The course of history and the nature of warfare was changed forever. When the Enola Gay and her crew landed at Tinian at 2:58 p.m., they were greeted by General Carl Spaatz, a large contingent of brass, and a crowd of GIs. Spaatz decorated Tibbets with the Distinguished Service Cross and the other crew members with Air Medals.

Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The Japanese surrendered six days later, ending World War II.

The film Above and Beyond (1952) depicted the World War II events involving Tibbets, with Robert Taylor starring as Tibbets and Eleanor Parker as his first wife, Lucy. An interview of Paul Tibbets can be seen in the 1982 movie Atomic Cafe. He was also interviewed in the 1970s for the British documentary series The World at War. Tibbets never expressed regret over his role.

In 1959, Col. Tibbets was promoted to Brigadier General. He retired from the U.S. Air Force on August 31, 1966 .

In the 1960s, Tibbets was posted as military attaché in India, but this posting was rescinded after all political parties in India protested his presence. In 1976, he and his wife, Andrea, moved to Columbus, where he was president of Executive Jet Aviation, an air taxi company, until he retired in 1985.

Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend.

Ezra Pound Biography [American poet and critic] 1885–1972

A Short Story Of full Ezra Loomis Pound: (born Oct. 30, 1885, Hailey, Idaho, U.S.—died Nov. 1, 1972, Venice, Italy) American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and confinement until 1958.

Early life and career
Pound was born in a small mining town in Idaho, the only child of a Federal Land Office official, Homer Loomis Pound of Wisconsin, and Isabel Weston of New York City. About 1887 the family moved to the eastern states, and in June 1889, following Homer Pound's appointment to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, they settled in nearby Wyncote, where Pound lived a normal middle-class childhood.

After two years at Cheltenham Military Academy, which he left without graduating, he attended a local high school. From there he went for two years (1901–03) to the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. He took a Ph.B. (bachelor of philosophy) degree at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., in 1905 and returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work. He received his M.A. in June 1906 but withdrew from the university after working one more year toward his doctorate. He left with a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Provençal, and Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English literature and grammar.

In the autumn of 1907, Pound became professor of Romance languages at Wabash Presbyterian College, Crawfordsville, Ind. Although his general behaviour fairly reflected his Presbyterian upbringing, he was already writing poetry and was affecting a bohemian manner. His career came quickly to an end, and in February 1908, with light luggage and the manuscript of a book of poems that had been rejected by at least one American publisher, he set sail for Europe.

He had been to Europe three times before, the third time alone in the summer of 1906, when he had gathered the material for his first three published articles: “Raphaelite Latin,” concerning the Latin poets of the Renaissance, and “Interesting French Publications,” concerning the troubadours (both published in the Book News Monthly, Philadelphia, September 1906), and “Burgos, a Dream City of Old Castile” (October issue).

Now, with little money, he sailed to Gibraltar and southern Spain, then on to Venice, where in June 1908 he published, at his own expense, his first book of poems, A lume spento. About September 1908 he went to London, where he was befriended by the writer and editor Ford Madox Ford (who published him in his English Review), entered William Butler Yeats's circle, and joined the “school of images,” a modern group presided over by the philosopher T.E. Hulme.

Success abroad
In England, success came quickly to Pound. A book of poems, Personae, was published in April 1909; a second book, Exultations, followed in October; and a third book, The Spirit of Romance, based on lectures delivered in London (1909–10), was published in 1910.

After a trip home—a last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to make a literary life for himself in Philadelphia or New York City—he returned to Europe in February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany, and France. Toward the end of 1911 he met an English journalist, Alfred R. Orage, editor of the socialist weekly New Age, who opened its pages to him and provided him with a small but regular income during the next nine years.

In 1912 Pound became London correspondent for the small magazine Poetry (Chicago); he did much to enhance the magazine's importance and was soon a dominant figure in Anglo-American verse. He was among the first to recognize and review the poetry of Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence and to praise the sculpture of the modernists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. As leader of the Imagist movement of 1912–14, successor of the “school of images,” he drew up the first Imagist manifesto, with its emphasis on direct and sparse language and precise images in poetry, and he edited the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914).

A shaper of modern literature
Though his friend Yeats had already become famous, Pound succeeded in persuading him to adopt a new, leaner style of poetic composition. In 1914, the year of his marriage to Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Yeats's friend Olivia Shakespear, he began a collaboration with the then-unknown James Joyce. As unofficial editor of The Egoist (London) and later as London editor of The Little Review (New York City), he saw to the publication of Joyce's novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, thus spreading Joyce's name and securing financial assistance for him. In that same year he gave T.S. Eliot a similar start in his career as poet and critic.

He continued to publish his own poetry (Ripostes, 1912; Lustra, 1916) and prose criticism (Pavannes and Divisions, 1918). From the literary remains of the great Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, which had been presented to Pound in 1913, he succeeded in publishing highly acclaimed English versions of early Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915), and two volumes of Japanese Noh plays (1916–17) as well.

Development as a poet
Unsettled by the slaughter of World War I and the spirit of hopelessness he felt was pervading England after its conclusion, Pound decided to move to Paris, publishing before he left two of his most important poetical works, “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” in the book Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). “Propertius” is a comment on the British Empire in 1917, by way of Propertius and the Roman Empire. Mauberley, a finely chiseled “portrait” of one aspect of British literary culture in 1919, is one of the most praised poems of the 20th century.

During his 12 years in London, Pound had completely transformed himself as a poet. He arrived a Late Victorian for whom love was a matter of “lute strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales that blind me.” Within five or six years he was writing a new, adult poetry that spoke calmly of current concerns in common speech. In this drier intellectual air, “as clear as metal,” Pound's verse took on new qualities of economy, brevity, and clarity as he used concrete details and exact visual images to capture concentrated moments of experience. Pound's search for laconic precision owed much to his constant reading of past literature, including Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin classics, Dante, and such 19th-century French works as Théophile Gautier's Émaux et camées and Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. Like his friend T.S. Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest standards of the past. Modernism for its own sake, untested against the past, drew anathemas from him. His progress may be seen in attempts at informality (1911):

Have tea, damn the Caesars,
Talk of the latest success. . .

in the gathering strength of his 1911 version of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer”:

Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten,
fell on the stern
In icy feathers. . .

and in the confident free verse of “The Return” (1912):

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet. . .

From this struggle there emerged the short, perfectly worded free-verse poems in Lustra. In his poetry Pound was now able to deal efficiently with a whole range of human activities and emotions, without raising his voice. The movement of the words and the images they create are no longer the secondhand borrowings of youth or apprenticeship but seem to belong to the observing intelligence that conjures up the particular work in hand. Many of the Lustra poems are remarkable for perfectly paced endings:

Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.

But the culmination of Pound's years in London was his 18-part long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which ranged from close observation of the artist and society to the horrors of mass production and World War I; from brilliant echo of the past:

When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

to the syncopation of

With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.

The Cantos
During his stay in Paris (1921–24) Pound met and helped the young American novelist Ernest Hemingway; wrote an opera, Le Testament, based on poems of François Villon; assisted T.S. Eliot with the editing of his long poem The Waste Land; and acted as correspondent for the New York literary journal The Dial.

In 1924 Pound tired of Paris and moved to Rapallo, Italy, which was to be his home for the next 20 years. In 1925 he had a daughter, Maria, by the expatriate American violinist Olga Rudge, and in 1926 his wife, Dorothy, gave birth to a son, Omar. The daughter was brought up by a peasant woman in the Italian Tirol, the son by relatives in England. In 1927–28 Pound edited his own magazine, Exile, and in 1930 he brought together, under the title A Draft of XXX Cantos, various segments of his ambitious long poem The Cantos, which he had begun in 1915.

The 1930s saw the publication of further volumes of The Cantos (Eleven New Cantos, 1934; The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 1937; Cantos LII–LXXI, 1940) and a collection of some of his best prose (Make It New, 1934). A growing interest in music caused him to arrange a long series of concerts in Rapallo during the 1930s, and, with the assistance of Olga Rudge, he played a large part in the rediscovery of the 18th-century Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. The results of his continuing investigation in the areas of culture and history were published in his brilliant but fragmentary prose work Guide to Kulchur (1938).

Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, he turned more and more to history, especially economic history, a subject in which he had been interested since his meeting in London in 1918 with Clifford Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, an economic theory stating that maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars. He became obsessed with monetary reform (ABC of Economics, 1933; Social Credit, 1935; What Is Money For?, 1939), involved himself in politics, and declared his admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 1935). The obsession affected his Cantos, which even earlier had shown evidence of becoming an uncontrolled series of personal and historical episodes.

Anti-American broadcasts
As war in Europe drew near, Pound returned home (1939) in the hope that he could help keep the peace between Italy and the United States. He went back to Italy a disappointed man, and between 1941 and 1943, after Italy and the United States were at war, he made several hundred broadcasts over Rome Radio on subjects ranging from James Joyce to the control of money and the U.S. government by Jewish bankers and often openly condemned the American war effort. He was arrested by U.S. forces in 1945 and spent six months in a prison camp for army criminals near Pisa. Despite harsh conditions there, he translated Confucius into English (The Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot, 1951) and wrote The Pisan Cantos (1948), the most moving section of his long poem-in-progress.

Returned to the United States to face trial for treason, he was pronounced “insane and mentally unfit for trial” by a panel of doctors and spent 12 years (1946–58) in Saint Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. During this time he continued to write The Cantos (Section: Rock-Drill, 1955; Thrones, 1959), translated ancient Chinese poetry (The Classic Anthology, 1954) and Sophocles' Trachiniai (Women of Trachis, 1956), received visitors regularly, and kept up a voluminous and worldwide correspondence. Controversy surrounding him burst out anew when, in 1949, he was awarded the important Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos. When on April 18, 1958, he was declared unfit to stand trial and the charges against him were dropped, he was released from Saint Elizabeth's. He returned to Italy, dividing the year between Rapallo and Venice.

Pound lapsed into silence in 1960, leaving The Cantos unfinished. More than 800 pages long, they are fragmentary and formless despite recurring themes and ideas. The Cantos are the logbook of Pound's own private voyage through Greek mythology, ancient China and Egypt, Byzantium, Renaissance Italy, the works of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and many other periods and subjects, including economics and banking and the nooks and crannies of his own memory and experience. Pound even convinced himself that the poem's faults and weaknesses, inevitable from the nature of the undertaking, were part of an underlying method. Yet there are numerous passages such as only he could have written that are among the best of the century.

Pound died in Venice in 1972. Out of his 60 years of publishing activity came 70 books of his own, contributions to about 70 others, and more than 1,500 articles. A complete listing of his works is in Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (1963; rev. ed 1983). Most of the writing on which Pound's fame now rests may be found in Personae (The Collected Poems; 1926, new ed. 1949), a selection of poems Pound wished to keep in print in 1926, with a few earlier and later poems added in 1949; The Cantos (1970), cantos 1–117, a collection of all the segments published to date; The Spirit of Romance (1910); Literary Essays (1954), the bulk of his best criticism, ed. with an introduction by T.S. Eliot; Guide to Kulchur (1938); and The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. by D.D. Paige (1950), an excellent introduction to Pound's literary life and inimitable epistolary style.

Walter Payton Biography [American football player] 1954–1999

Short Story of full Walter Jerry Payton , byname Sweetness: American football player. Born on July 25, 1954, in Columbia, Mississippi. Sometimes known by his nickname "Sweetness," Payton was equally admired for his off-the-field personality as well as for his football skills. He first began to attract attention as a halfback at Jackson State University, making the starting lineup in 1971 — his freeman year. Payton was selected for the All-American team and was named Black College Player of the Year for in 1973 and 1974. In his four years at Jackson State, he rushed for more than 3,500 yards and scored more than 450 points, showing fans and opponents alike just what a versatile and talented player he was. Off the field, Payton showed his interest in helping with others, studying education with an emphasis on working with the deaf.

Payton continued to excel once he became a professional player in 1975. Picked by the Chicago Bears, he became a running back who was known for his speed. During his 13 seasons with the team, Payton made nine Pro Bowl appearances and won the National Football League's (NFL) Most Valuable Player Award twice — in 1977 and 1985. Retiring after the 1987 season, he held the NFL rushing record with 16,726 yards and the single game rushing record of 275 yards. Payton was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1996.

After leaving the team, Payton explored business opportunities, including real estate, restaurants, and race cars. Living up to his nickname, Payton spent much of his time working make life better for other people. He formed the Halas Payton Foundation in 1988 to help inner-city kids in the Chicago area. He later established the Walter Payton Foundation, also dedicated to helping young people in the state of Illinois.

Payton became ill in early 1999 and died on November 1 of that year from cancer. He was survived by his wife Connie and two children, Jarrett and Brittney. His charitable organization is now called the Walter and Connie Payton Foundation with his wife continuing to support the causes and programs that Payton cared about.

Bob Lemon Biography [Professional baseball player] 1920–2000

Short Story Of Bob Lemon: Professional baseball player. Born September 22, 1920, in San Bernardino, California. Bob Lemon signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians in 1938, and spent several years in the minor-league system as an infielder-outfielder before joining the Navy during World War II. After his first full season in the major leagues in 1946, the Indians’ manager Lou Boudreau switched him to pitcher. In 1948, Lemon— who had at first resisted the change— threw a no-hitter against the Detroit Tigers and was named to the American League All-Star team. He also won Games 2 and 6 en route to the Indians’ World Series win over the Atlanta Braves.
A right-hander, Lemon became part of one of the most potent pitching staffs in history, alongside Bob Feller, Mike Garcia, and Early Wynn. He was named to seven All-Star teams in nine years, and he led the league in victories three times, in complete games five times, and in innings pitched four times. In 13 seasons, Bob Lemon compiled a record of 207-128 and an earned-run average of 3.23. A great all-around player, Lemon also hit 37 home runs, ranking second (behind Wes Ferrell) on the all-time list for pitchers. He finished his playing career in the minor league in San Diego, and went on to work as a scout and a manager for the Kansas City Royals and the Chicago White Sox. He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.

In 1978, Lemon was hired as the manager of the New York Yankees; the team staged a major league comeback to overtake the Boston Red Sox and went on to win the World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Lemon was replaced in mid-season 1979, then rehired in 1981, when he led the Yankees to an American League championship. In the middle of the 1982 season, Lemon was again fired by the volatile Yankees’ owner, George Steinbrenner, and retired from baseball.

Maeve Brennan Biography [Writer, journalist] 1917–1993

Short Brief of Maeve Brennan: Writer, journalist. Born January 6, 1917 in Dublin, Ireland. Maeve Brennan's parents were deeply involved in Ireland's political struggles during her youth, and her father, Robert Brennan, spent much of her childhood in prison and on the run. After her father was made the first Irish ambassador to the U.S., the family moved to America. Maeve Brennan studied English at the American University in Washington and later worked at Harper's Bazaar magazine in New York City.

In 1949, Maeve Brennan was offered a staff writing position at The New Yorker, and she stayed with the magazine for more than 30 years. She wrote social commentary as "The Long-Winded Lady" and short stories set in Dublin. She was well read and admired throughout the United States for her beauty, talent and glamor.

Maeve Brennan was married to The New Yorker's managing editor St. Clair McKelway for five years. During the 1970s, she succumbed to alcoholism and mental illness, eventually becoming homeless and destitute. She died at age 76 after being committed to Lawrence Hospital.

Eleuthere Irenee Du Pont Biography (Manufacturer, businessman) 1771–1834

Short Brief of Eleuthere Irenee Du Pont: Manufacturer, businessman. Born on June 24, 1771, in Paris, France. E. I. du Pont was the founder of what is now known as DuPont, one of the world’s largest chemical and industrial companies. His father, Pierre Samuel du Pont, was a watchmaker by trade as well as an economist, publisher, and government official. Interested in explosives, he studied with chemist Antoine Lavoisier for a time.

After the French Revolution, du Pont fled to the United States and sought to build on his explosives expertise. He started a powder mill on the Brandywine River in Delaware in 1802, which proved to be first of many for this skilled manufacturer. Wanting to make the best powder possible, du Pont was vigilant about the quality of the materials he used. The business really took off with supply orders from the U.S. government for the troops fighting in the War of 1812.

For 32 years, du Pont served as president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. His later life was marked by sadness after the death of his wife Sophie in 1828. He died of heart failure on October 31, 1834. The business he built was passed down to his descendents who continued to grow it into one of the U.S. best-known companies.

Studs Terkel Biography (U.S. radio personality and author) 1912–2008

Short Story of original Louis Turkel: (born May 16, 1912, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 31, 2008, Chicago, Ill.) U.S. radio personality and author. He moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. Terkel gave up a legal career to become a radio disk jockey and interviewer, exposure that led to his own television show in 1950. In 1953, blacklisted from television for his leftist leanings, he returned to radio, continuing at the same station for 45 years. His books include Division Street (1967), about Chicago; Hard Times (1970), about the Depression; Working (1974), on Americans and their jobs; The Good War, on World War II (1984, Pulitzer Prize); and Race (1992), on American feelings about race.

River Phoenix Biography (Actor, activist) 1970–1993

A Short Story of River Phoenix: Actor, activist. Born River Jude Bottom on August 23, 1970, in Madras, Oregon. Considered one of the most talented actors of his generation, River Phoenix had his promising career cut short by his premature death in 1993. He was born on a farm where his parents, John Lee Bottom and Arlyn Dunetz, were working. The couple followed a bohemian lifestyle, moving around a lot with their infant son. They named their son after the river of life in Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha.

In 1972, the Bottoms took their lives in a new direction, joining the Children of God religious movement. Phoenix became a big brother when the couple had second child, a daughter named Rain, that same year. As missionaries for the Children of God, the Bottoms lived in Texas, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Phoenix gained two more siblings during this time—brother Joaquin and sister Liberty. (Sister Summer was born later.)

As a young child, Phoenix learned to play guitar and sing. River and Rain performed on the streets in Caracas, Venezuela, to earn money and pass out literature on their religious beliefs. His parents eventually became disillusioned with their religious group and decided to leave it and return to the United States in 1978. They spent time in Florida where Phoenix and some of the other children performed in talent shows and started to attract attention for their musical and acting abilities.

Before long, Phoenix and his family moved out to California to try to make in the entertainment industry. His mother found an agent to represent all of the children and got a job working as a secretary at NBC. At first, Phoenix landed a few commercials. He then got a role as the youngest brother on the television series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in 1982. While the show only lasted one season, Phoenix continued to work, making a number of guest spots on other shows, such as Hotel and Family Ties. He also had a notable role in the 1985 television movie Surviving.

That same year, Phoenix made his film debut playing a young inventor in Explorers (1985) with Ethan Hawke. His next film, however, led to a career breakthrough. In Stand by Me (1986), four friends (Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell) set out to find the body of a missing teenager. Phoenix earned raves for his performance as a youth with a troubled home life in this coming-of-age adventure drama based on a novella by Stephen King.

Phoenix next appeared as Harrison Ford’s son in The Mosquito Coast (1986), which received mixed reviews. In 1988, he appeared in a trio of films: Little Nikita, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, and Running on Empty. Of the three, Running on Empty was the most critically successful. Phoenix played the son of 60s radicals (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) who went underground after blowing up a building, accidentally killing someone in the process. In the film, his character is a musically gifted teenager who must decide between staying with his family on the run and leaving them to follow his own dreams. His girlfriend in the film was played by Martha Plimpton, and she and Phoenix became involved off-screen as well. Directed by Sydney Lumet, the film earned many accolades with critic Roger Ebert calling it “one of the best films of the year.” Phoenix received his first and only Academy Award nomination for his work on the film.

Phoenix reteamed with Harrison Ford for the 1989 box office hit Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was directed by Steven Spielberg. In the film, he played the famed adventurer in his youth. After this brief sojourn into the action genre, Phoenix tried his hand at comedy with I Love You to Death (1990). His character helps a scorned wife (Tracey Ullman) try to bump off her cheating husband (Kevin Kline) and even hires two drug-addled henchmen (William Hurt and Keanu Reeves) to assist in the task.

Tackling much more weighty material, Phoenix co-starred with Reeves in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991). He played a narcoleptic male prostitute who wants to find his long-lost mother and develops a special friendship with a fellow hustler (Keanu Reeves). Phoenix earned strong reviews for his riveting performance in the film. That same year, he proved to be equally compelling and convincing as a Marine just about to go to Vietnam in Dogfight (1991) with Lili Taylor.

Phoenix took a supporting role in the comedic thriller Sneakers (1992) and proved that he could hold his own on screen with such established performers as Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, and David Strathairn. Acting, however, was just one part of Phoenix’s life. A strong supporter of animal rights, he became a vegetarian at the age of 8. “When I was old enough to realize all meat was killed, I saw it as an irrational way of using our power, to take a weaker thing and mutilate it,” Phoenix told The New York Times in 1989. He became a devout vegan, eschewing all dairy products because of how the animals were treated. An ardent environmentalist, Phoenix supported such organizations as Earth Save and Earth Trust.

Music was another one of Phoenix’s passions. With his sister Rain, he formed the band Aleka’s Attic. He wrote many songs for the group, which recorded a few tracks but never released an album. With The Thing Called Love (1993), Phoenix got a chance to combine acting with music, playing a singer wants to make it in Nashville. He even contributed one of his own songs to the soundtrack. The film also starred Samantha Mathis as his love interest, and the two started dating.

For his last completed film, Phoenix starred with Alan Bates, Richard Harris, and Dermot Mulroney in director Sam Shepard’s western Silent Tongue (1994). He had started work on Dark Blood with Jonathan Pryce and Judy Davis when tragedy struck. During a break in filming, Phoenix went out to the Viper Room, a popular nightclub that was partly owned by Johnny Depp, with his brother Joaquin, his sister Rain, and his girlfriend Samantha Mathis.

At some point during the evening, Phoenix took some drugs and became ill. He was helped outside and started to have seizures. His brother Joaquin called 911 while his sister Rain tried to help Phoenix who was lying on the sidewalk. When the ambulance arrived, paramedics worked on resuscitating the young actor at the scene. Their efforts failed, and they transported him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where he was declared dead in the early hours of October 31.

Family, friends, and fans mourned the untimely passing of the talented young star. He was only 23 years old. After his death, Harrison Ford said “He once played my son, and I came to love him like a son, and was proud to watch grow into a man of such talent and integrity and compassion,” according to The New York Times. A memorial service was held for Phoenix and his ashes were scattered at the family’s Florida ranch.

Harry Houdini Biography (Magician, escape artist) 1874–1926

A Short Story Of also known as: Erik Weisz, Ehrich Weisz, or Erich Weisz: Magician, escape artist. Born Erich Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary. One of seven children born to a Jewish rabbi and his wife, Erich moved with his family as a child to Appleton, Wisconsin, where he later claimed he was born. When he was 13, Erich moved with his father to New York City, taking on odd jobs and living in a boarding house before the rest of the family joined them. It was there that he became interested in trapeze arts.

In 1894, Erich launched his career as a professional magician and renamed himself Harry Houdini, the first name being a derivative of his childhood nickname, "Ehrie," and the last an homage to the great French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. Though his magic met with little success, he soon drew attention for his feats of escape using handcuffs. In 1893, he married fellow performer Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, who would serve as Houdini's lifelong stage assistant.

In 1899, Houdini's act caught the attention of Martin Beck, an entertainment manager who soon got him booked at some of the best vaudeville venues in the country, followed by a tour of Europe. Houdini's feats would involve the local police, who would strip search him, place him in shackles, and lock him in their jails. The show was a huge sensation, and he soon became the highest-paid performer in American vaudeville.

Houdini continued his act in the United States in the early 1900s, constantly upping the ante from handcuffs and straightjackets to locked, water-filled tanks and nailed packing crates. In 1912, his act reached its pinnacle, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, which would be the hallmark of his career. In it, Houdini was suspended by his feet and lowered upside-down in a locked glass cabinet filled with water, requiring him to hold his breath for more than three minutes to escape. The performance was so daring and such a crowd-pleaser that it remained in his act until his death in 1926.

Houdini's wealth allowed him to indulge in other passions, such as aviation and film. He purchased his first plane in 1909 and became the first person to man a controlled power flight over Australia in 1910. He also launched a movie career, releasing his first film in 1901, Merveilleux Exploits du Célébre Houdini Paris, which documented his escapes. He starred in several subsequent films, including The Master Mystery, The Grim Game and Terror Island. In New York, he started his own production company, Houdini Picture Corporation, and a film lab called The Film Development Corporation, but neither was a success. In 1923, Houdini became president of Martinka & Co., America's oldest magic company.

As president of the Society of American Magicians, Harry Houdini was a vigorous campaigner against fraudulent psychic mediums. Most notably, he debunked renowned medium Mina Crandon, better known as Margery. This act turned him against former friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed deeply in Spiritualism and Margery's sight.

Though there are mixed reports as to the cause of Henry Houdini's death, it is certain that he suffered from acute appendicitis. Whether his demise was caused by a McGill University student who was testing his will by punching him in the stomach (with permission) or by poison from a band of angry Spiritualists, it is unknown. What is known is that he died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on October 31, 1926 at age 52.

After his death, Houdini's props and effects were used by his brother Theodore Hardeen, who eventually sold them to magician and collector Sidney H. Radner. Much of the collection could be see at the Houdini Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin, until Radner auctioned it off in 2004. Most of the prized pieces, including the Water Torture Cell, went to magician David Copperfield.

Indira Gandhi Biography (politician who served as prime minister of India) 1917–1984

A Short Story Of full Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi: (born Nov. 19, 1917, Allahabad, India—died Oct. 31, 1984, New Delhi) politician who served as prime minister of India for three consecutive terms (1966–77) and a fourth term (1980–84). She was assassinated by Sikh extremists.

She was the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. She attended Visva-Bharati University, West Bengal, and the University of Oxford, and in 1942 she married Feroze Gandhi (died 1960), a fellow member of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). She was a member of the working committee of the ruling Congress Party from 1955, and in 1959 she was elected to the largely honorary post of party president. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru as prime minister in 1964, named her minister of information and broadcasting in his government.

On Shastri's sudden death in January 1966, Gandhi became leader of the Congress Party—and thus also prime minister—in a compromise between the right and left wings of the party. Her leadership, however, came under continual challenge from the right wing of the party, led by a former minister of finance, Morarji Desai. In the election of 1967 she won a slim majority and had to accept Desai as deputy prime minister. In 1971, however, she won a sweeping electoral victory over a coalition of conservative parties. Gandhi strongly supported East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in its secessionist conflict with Pakistan in late 1971, and India's armed forces achieved a swift and decisive victory over Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh.

In March 1972, buoyed by the country's success against Pakistan, Gandhi again led her new Congress Party to a landslide victory in national elections. Shortly afterward her defeated Socialist Party opponent charged that she had violated the election laws. In June 1975 the High Court of Allahabad ruled against her, which meant that she would be deprived of her seat in Parliament and would have to stay out of politics for six years. In response, she declared a state of emergency throughout India, imprisoned her political opponents, and assumed emergency powers, passing many laws limiting personal freedoms. During this period she implemented several unpopular policies, including large-scale sterilization as a form of birth control. When long-postponed national elections were held in 1977, Gandhi and her party were soundly defeated, whereupon she left office. The Janata Party took over the reins of government.

Early in 1978 Gandhi's supporters split from the Congress Party and formed the Congress (I) Party—the “I” signifying Indira. She was briefly imprisoned (October 1977 and December 1978) on charges of official corruption. Despite these setbacks, she won a new seat in Parliament in November 1978, and her Congress (I) Party began to gather strength. Dissension within the ruling Janata Party led to the fall of its government in August 1979. When new elections for the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) were held in January 1980, Gandhi and her Congress (I) Party were swept back into power in a landslide victory. Her son Sanjay Gandhi, who had become her chief political adviser, also won a seat in the Lok Sabha. All legal cases against Indira, as well as against her son, were withdrawn.

Sanjay Gandhi's death in an airplane crash in June 1980 eliminated Indira's chosen successor from the political leadership of India. After Sanjay's death, Indira groomed her other son, Rajiv, for the leadership of her party. Gandhi adhered to the quasi-socialist policies of industrial development that had been begun by her father. She established closer relations with the Soviet Union, depending on that nation for support in India's long-standing conflict with Pakistan.

During the early 1980s Indira Gandhi was faced with threats to the political integrity of India. Several states sought a larger measure of independence from the central government, and Sikh extremists in Punjab state used violence to assert their demands for an autonomous state. In response, Gandhi ordered an army attack in June 1984 on the Harimandir (Golden Temple) at Amritsar, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, which led to the deaths of more than 450 Sikhs. Five months later Gandhi was killed in her garden by a fusillade of bullets fired by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in revenge for the attack on the Golden Temple.

Federico Fellini Biography (Italian film director) 1920 - 1993

A Short Story Of Federico Fellini: (born January 20, 1920, Rimini, Italy—died October 31, 1993, Rome) Italian film director who was one of the most celebrated and distinctive filmmakers of the period after World War II. Early in his career he helped inaugurate the Neorealist cinema movement, but he soon developed his own distinctive style of typically autobiographical films that imposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations and portrayed people at their most bizarre.


Early life and influences
After an uneventful provincial childhood during which he developed a talent as a cartoonist, Fellini at age 19 moved to Rome, where he contributed cartoons, gags, and stories to the humour magazine Marc'Aurelio. During World War II, Fellini worked as a scriptwriter for the radio program Cico e Pallina, starring Giulietta Masina, the actress who became Fellini's wife in 1943 and who went on to star in several of the director's greatest films during the course of their 50-year marriage. In 1944 Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini, who engaged him as one of a team of writers who created Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), often cited as the seminal film of the Italian Neorealist movement. Fellini's contribution to the screenplay earned him his first Oscar nomination.

Fellini quickly became one of Italy's most successful screenwriters. Although he wrote a number of important scripts for such directors as Pietro Germi (Il cammino della speranza [1950; The Path of Hope]), Alberto Lattuada (Senza pietá [1948; Without Pity]), and Luigi Comencini (Persiane chiuse [1951; Drawn Shutters]), his scripts for Rossellini are most important to the history of the Italian cinema. These include Paisà (1946; Paisan), perhaps the purest example of Italian Neorealism; Il miracolo (1948; “The Miracle,” an episode of the film L'Amore), a controversial work on the meaning of sainthood; and Europa '51 (1952; The Greatest Love), one of the first films in postwar Italy that began to move beyond the documentary realism of the Neorealist period toward an examination of psychological problems and Existentialist themes.

Fellini made his debut as director in collaboration with Lattuada on Luci del varietà (1951; Variety Lights). This was the first in a series of works dealing with provincial life and was followed by Lo sceicco bianco (1951; The White Sheik) and I vitelloni (1953; Spivs or The Young and the Passionate), his first critically and commercially successful work. This film, a bitterly sarcastic look at the idle “mama's boys” of the provinces, is still considered by some critics to be Fellini's masterpiece.

Major works
Fellini's next films formed a trilogy that dealt with salvation and the fate of innocence in a cruel and unsentimental world. One of Fellini's best-known works, the heavily symbolic La strada (1954; “The Road”), stars Anthony Quinn as a cruel, animalistic circus strongman and Masina as the pathetic waif who loves him. The film was shot on location in the desolate countryside between Viterbo and Abruzzo, with the great empty spaces reflecting the virtual inhumanity of the relationship between the principal characters. Although it was criticized by the left-wing press in Italy, the film was highly praised abroad, winning an Academy Award for best foreign film. Il bidone (1955; The Swindle), which starred Broderick Crawford in a role intended for Humphrey Bogart, was a rather unpleasant tale of petty swindlers who disguise themselves as priests in order to rob the peasantry. Garnering a second foreign film Oscar for Fellini was the more successful Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria), again starring Masina, this time as a simple, eternally optimistic Roman prostitute. Although not usually considered among Fellini's greatest works, Le notti de Cabiria (upon which the Broadway musical comedy Sweet Charity was based) remains a critical favourite and one of Fellini's most immediately likable films.

Fellini's next film, La dolce vita (1960; “The Sweet Life”), was his first collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni, the actor who would come to represent Fellini's alter ego in several films throughout the next two decades. The film—for which Fellini had Rome's main thoroughfare, the Via Veneto, rebuilt as a set—proved to be a panorama of the times, rife with surreal imagery, and a compelling indictment of popular media, decadent intellectuals, and aristocrats. Immediately hailed as one of the most important films ever made, La dolce vita contributed the word paparazzi (unscrupulous yellow-press photographers) to the English language and the adjective “Felliniesque” to the lexicon of film critics.

Regarded as a perfect blend of symbolism and realism, Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 12), is perhaps Fellini's most widely praised film and earned the director his third Oscar for best foreign film. Entitled 8 12 for the number of films Fellini had made to that time (seven features and three shorts), the work shows the plight of a famous director (based on Fellini, portrayed by Mastroianni) in creative paralysis. The high modernist aesthetics of the film became emblematic of the very notion of free, uninhibited artistic creativity, and in 1987 a panel of motion picture scholars from 18 European nations named 8 12 the best European film ever made.

In the wake of 8 12 Fellini's name became firmly linked to the vogue of the postwar European art film. He began to deal with the myth of Rome, the cinema, and, especially, the director's own life and fantasy world, all of which Fellini considered interrelated themes in his works. His films of the late 1960s combine dreamlike images with original uses of colour photography. Satyricon (1969), inspired by such ancient Roman writers as Petronius and Apuleius, tells of the wanderings of a group of aimless young men in the world of antiquity. Fellini, who was unconcerned with historical accuracy, attempted to explore the human condition in an age before Christianity and the concept of original sin. A bizarre, flamboyant work, Satyricon remains a film on which critical opinion is heatedly divided. Roma (1971; Fellini's Roma) is the director's personal portrait of the Eternal City, and Amarcord (1973), which won Fellini a fourth Oscar for best foreign film, offers a nostalgic remembrance of Fellini's provincial adolescence during the Fascist period.

Mature years
Many of Fellini's later films were less successful commercially and encountered critical resistance. The sumptuous Casanova (1976), praised by some as a visual masterpiece and derided by others as a hollow confection, was a brooding, melancholy meditation on the meaning of sex and death. Such works as La città delle donne (1980; City of Women), E la nave va (1983; And the Ship Sails On), Ginger e Fred (1985; Ginger and Fred), Intervista (1987; Interview), and La voce della luna (1989; The Voice of the Moon), his last feature film, reflect the complex evolution of Fellini's mature cinematic style and treat a variety of postmodern topics: the role of the male in an increasingly feminist society, the effects of television on contemporary life, the nature of artistic creativity, and the growing homogenization of popular culture. During the last years of his life, Fellini produced television commercials for Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, and the Banco di Roma that are regarded as extraordinary lessons in cinematography revealing the director's deep grasp of popular culture. He also exhibited his sketches and cartoons, many of which were taken from his private dream notebooks, thus uncovering the source of much of his artistic creativity, the unconscious.

Assessment
Although the subject of derision from some revisionist critics, Fellini assured for himself a place of prime importance in the history of filmmaking. His best films, all of which were partially written by him, are freely structured tales in which dream and reality, as well as autobiography and fantasy, mingle in a world of symbolism. Breaking with traditional techniques of motion picture production, he succeeded in making the film such a personal medium that his own creative and personal problems became legendary. He received numerous honours during his lifetime, including 8 Oscars, 23 Oscar nominations, a career achievement Oscar in 1993, the Golden Lion career award from the Venice Film Festival in 1985, and dozens of prizes from the world's most prestigious film festivals. A poll of international film directors conducted in 1992 by Sight and Sound magazine ranked Fellini as the most significant film director of all time and cited two of Fellini's works (La strada and 8 12) in a list of the 10 most influential films of all time.

P.W. Botha Biography (Prime minister and first state president of South Africa) 1916–2006

A Short Story of full name Pieter Willem Botha: (born Jan. 12, 1916, Paul Roux, S.Af.—died Oct. 31, 2006, Wilderness, near George) Prime minister (1978–84) and first state president (1984–89) of South Africa. Elected to parliament as a National Party candidate in 1948, Botha served in several subsequent posts before replacing John Vorster as prime minister in 1978. His government faced serious difficulties, including the coming to power of black governments in Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe, an insurgency in South West Africa (Namibia), and domestic unrest among black students and labour unions. Botha responded by backing antigovernment troops in the bordering states and suppressing rebellion at home. A target of criticism from within and outside his party, he fell ill and resigned in 1989.

Robert Goulet Biography (Singer and actor) 1933–2007

A Short Story Of Robert Goulet: Singer and actor Robert Goulet died October 30, 2007. He had been awaiting a lung transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after being found last month to have a rare form of pulmonary fibrosis, said Goulet spokesman Norm Johnson.

He was born November 26, 1933, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Robert was the only son born to working class parents, Joseph and Jeanette Goulet. From an early age, Joseph Goulet encouraged his son to sing in the local church choir. In 1947, Joseph died and the family moved to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. A devastated 14-year-old Robert vowed to fulfill his dying father's wish, and began to wholeheartedly pursue music.

After a brief stint as a radio disc jockey, Goulet won a scholarship to Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied acting and singing. In 1954, he prematurely traveled to New York in hopes of making it on Broadway. However, the only work Goulet found was as a stationary salesman in Gimbel's department store. Somewhat disillusioned, he returned to Toronto, where the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cast him in a leading role in the TV production Little Women. Goulet maintained his small screen success with a three year run as host of the variety series General Electric's Showtime. Throughout the late 1950s, he enjoyed steady work in theater productions, and was befittingly labeled 'Canada's first matinee idol' by the age of 24.

In 1959, Goulet was introduced to librettist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe, who were having difficulty casting the role of Lancelot in their stage production Camelot. Lerner and Loewe, impressed by Goulet's work, signed the virtual newcomer to play the part, opposite Richard Burton's King Arthur and Julie Andrews' Queen Guenevere. In October of 1960, Camelot opened in Toronto, briefly ran for a four-week engagement in Boston, and finally opened on Broadway in December of that year. Goulet elicited favorable reviews, most notably for his rendition of the plays heartfelt ballad If Ever I Would Leave You.

After Camelot's run, Goulet was booked on The Danny Thomas Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, which made him a household name among American audiences. Shortly after, he embarked on a series of nightclub engagements, making his debut at New York's famous The Persian Room.

Goulet segued onto the silver screen when he provided the character voice in the animated feature Gay Purr-ee (1962), with Judy Garland. Two years later, he was featured in his first film Honeymoon Hotel, and headlined his first TV special An Hour with Robert Goulet. He remained a great success throughout the 1960s, making a number of TV specials, including Brigadoon (1966), Carousel (1967), and Kiss Me, Kate (1968). In 1968 he received a Best Actor Tony Award for his performance as a French photographer in the musical Happy Time.

In the 1970s, Goulet became a regular fixture in Las Vegas. During this period he developed a growing dependency on alcohol. He quit drinking in 1979, although there was an isolated incident in 1983, when he was arrested for drunk driving.

In 1986, Goulet toured in a U.S. production of South Pacific. Six years later, Goulet commenced a two-year, 50-city national tour of Camelot. This time, in the role of King Arthur, he played to packed houses, earning $80,000 a week. In 1996, his performance in Man of La Mancha introduced him to a whole new generation of theatergoers. Goulet's most recent project was a small part in 2000's The Last Producer, which starred Benjamin Bratt and Burt Reynolds. He was also signed to play the devil in Christopher Coppola's G-Men from Hell, which is still in production.

Goulet was married to his third wife, Vera Novak, for 25 years at the time of his death. He was previously married to Louis Longmore and to actress Carol Lawrence. He has one daughter with Longmore and two sons with Lawrence.

Steve Allen Biography (U.S. entertainer and songwriter) 1921 - 2000

A Short Story Of original Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen: (born Dec. 26, 1921, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 30, 2000, Encino, Calif.) U.S. entertainer and songwriter. He appeared as a comedian on radio in the 1940s before moving to late-night television, where he created and hosted The Tonight Show (1954–57) and The Steve Allen Show (1956–60). He hosted several other television shows, including Meeting of Minds (1977–81). He composed over 3,000 songs, including “Picnic” and “Impossible,” and appeared in films such as The Benny Goodman Story (1955).

Sir Walter Raleigh Biography (Courtier, explorer, soldier, and writer) 1554 - 1618

A Short Story of Raleigh also spelled Ralegh: Courtier, explorer, soldier, and writer, born in Hayes Barton, Devon, SW England, UK. He studied at Oxford before serving in the Huguenot army in France (1569). A rival of the Earl of Essex for the queen's favors, he served (1580) in Elizabeth's army in Ireland, distinguishing himself by his ruthlessness at the siege of Smerwick and by the plantation of English and Scots Protestants in Munster. Elizabeth rewarded him with a large estate in Ireland, knighted him (1585), and gave him trade privileges and the right to colonize America.

In 1587 he explored from North Carolina to present-day Florida, naming the region Virginia in honor of Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen." In 1587 Raleigh sent an ill-fated second expedition of colonists to Roanoke. In 1588 he took part in the victory over the Spanish Armada. He led other raids against Spanish possessions and returned with much booty. Raleigh forfeited Elizabeth's favor by his courtship of and subsequent marriage to one of her maids-of-honor, Bessy Throckmorton, and he was committed to the Tower (1592). Hoping, on his release, to recover his position, he led an abortive expedition to Guiana to search for El Dorado, a legendary land of gold. Instead, he helped to introduce the potato plant and tobacco use in England and Ireland.

Elizabeth's successor, James I, distrusted and feared Raleigh, charged him with treason and condemned him to death, but commuted the sentence to imprisonment in the Tower (1603). There Raleigh lived with his wife and servants, and wrote his History of the World (1614). He was released in 1616 to search for gold in South America. Against the king's undertaking to the Spanish, he invaded and pillaged Spanish territory, was forced to return to England without booty, and was arrested on the orders of the king. His original death sentence for treason was invoked, and he was executed at Westminster. A gifted poet, writer, and scholar, many of his poems and writings were destroyed. A pioneer of the Italian sonnet-form in English, he was a patron of the arts, notably of Edmund Spenser in his composition of The Faerie Queene (1589–96).

Joseph Pulitzer Biography (U.S. newspaper editor and publisher) 1847–1911

A Short Story of Joseph Pulitzer: (born April 10, 1847, Makó, Hung.—died Oct. 29, 1911, Charleston, S.C., U.S.) Hungarian-born U.S. newspaper editor and publisher. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1864 to serve in the American Civil War. After the war he became a reporter and then proprietor at German-language newspapers in St. Louis and entered Missouri politics. In 1878 he merged the St. Louis Dispatch (founded 1864) and the Post (founded 1875) into the Post-Dispatch, which soon became the city's dominant evening newspaper. Shifting his interests to New York City, he purchased the World (1883) and founded the Evening World (1887). He helped establish the pattern of the modern newspaper by combining exposés of political corruption and crusading investigative reporting with publicity stunts, self-advertising, and sensationalism. In his will he endowed the Columbia University School of Journalism and established the Pulitzer Prizes.