PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: Pulitzer Prize
35th president of the United States
John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States (1961–63), who faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban...
American composer
George Gershwin was one of the most significant and popular American composers of all time. He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions...
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with the intellectualism...
American dramatist
Eugene O’Neill was a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
American poet
Robert Frost was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous...
American historian
Henry Adams was a historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams. Adams was the product of Boston’s Brahmin class, a...
British poet
W. H. Auden was an English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression. Most of his verse dramas of this period were written in collaboration...
American novelist
Margaret Mitchell was an American author of the enormously popular novel Gone With the Wind (1936). The novel earned Mitchell a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and it was the source of the classic...
American musician
Duke Ellington was an American pianist who was the greatest jazz composer and bandleader of his time. One of the originators of big-band jazz, Ellington led his band for more than half a century, composed...
American biologist
E.O. Wilson was an American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of...
American historian
Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian best known for the “frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United...
United States general
John J. Pershing was a U.S. Army general who commanded the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe during World War I. Pershing graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New...
American writer
Ray Bradbury was an American author best known for his highly imaginative short stories and novels that blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism, and an awareness of the hazards...
American aviator
Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator, one of the best-known figures in aeronautical history, remembered for the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York City to Paris, on...
American novelist
Upton Sinclair was a prolific American novelist and polemicist for socialism, health, temperance, free speech, and worker rights, among other causes. His classic muckraking novel The Jungle (1906) is a...
American composer
Aaron Copland was an American composer who achieved a distinctive musical characterization of American themes in an expressive modern style. Copland, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in New...
American musician
John Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, an iconic figure of 20th-century jazz. Coltrane’s first musical influence was his father, a tailor and part-time musician. John...
American director and producer
Joshua Logan was an American stage and motion-picture director, producer, and writer. Best known as the stage director who brought to Broadway such classics as Charley’s Aunt (1940), Annie Get Your Gun...
American composer and conductor
John Adams is an American composer and conductor whose works are among the most-performed of contemporary classical music. Adams became proficient on the clarinet at an early age (sometimes freelancing...
American astronomer
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer and science writer. A popular and influential figure in the United States, he was controversial in scientific, political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial...
American composer
Charles Ives was a significant American composer who is known for a number of innovations that anticipated most of the later musical developments of the 20th century. Ives received his earliest musical...
American playwright
Tennessee Williams was an American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility. Williams became interested in playwriting...
American actor and playwright
Tracy Letts is an American actor and dramatist who was best known for his award-winning play August: Osage County (2007; film 2013). Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma, the home of Southeastern Oklahoma...
American author and illustrator
Art Spiegelman is an American author and illustrator whose Holocaust narratives Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991)...
American writer
Edith Wharton was an American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born. Edith Jones came of a distinguished and long-established New York family....
American scholar
Stephen Greenblatt is an American scholar who was credited with establishing New Historicism, an approach to literary criticism that mandated the interpretation of literature in terms of the milieu from...
American musician
Hank Williams was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist who in the 1950s arguably became country music’s first superstar. An immensely talented songwriter and an impassioned vocalist, he also experienced...
American film critic
Roger Ebert was an American film critic, perhaps the best known of his profession, who became the first person to receive a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism (1975). Ebert’s journalism career began at...
American author and oral historian
Studs Terkel was an American author and oral historian who chronicled the lives of Americans from the Great Depression to the early 21st century. After spending his early childhood in New York City, Terkel...
American author
Norman Mailer was an American novelist and journalist best known for using a form of journalism—called New Journalism—that combines the imaginative subjectivity of literature with the more objective qualities...
American author
David Mamet is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter noted for his often desperate working-class characters and for his distinctive, colloquial, and frequently profane dialogue. Mamet began...
American composer and lyricist
Stephen Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theater. Precocious as a child, Sondheim...
American playwright and actor
Sam Shepard was an American playwright and actor whose plays adroitly blend images of the American West, Pop motifs, science fiction, and other elements of popular and youth culture. As the son of a career...
American historian and author
Robert Caro is an American historian and author whose extensive biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses went beyond studies of the men who were their subjects to investigate the practice of political...
American dramatist
August Wilson was a playwright who penned an acclaimed cycle of plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, about Black American life. He won Pulitzer Prizes for two of them: Fences and...
American author
Michael Chabon is an American novelist and essayist known for his elegant deployment of figurative language and adventurous experiments with genre conceits. His narratives are frequently suffused with...
American composer, pianist, and conductor
Marvin Hamlisch was an American composer, pianist, and conductor of remarkable versatility, admired especially for his scores for film and theatre. His stylistically diverse corpus encompasses instrumental...
American poet
W.S. Merwin was an American poet and translator known for the spare style of his poetry, in which he expressed his concerns about the alienation of humans from their environment. After graduating from...
American author
Saul Bellow was an American novelist whose characterizations of modern urban man, disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Brought up in a...
American novelist
John Steinbeck was an American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory...
American historian, journalist, and author
Garry Wills is an American historian, journalist, and author of provocative books on Roman Catholicism, history, and politics. Wills grew up in Wisconsin and Michigan, where he spent his childhood immersed...
American author
Willa Cather was an American novelist noted for her portrayals of the settlers and frontier life on the American plains. At age 9 Cather moved with her family from Virginia to frontier Nebraska, where...
American author
John Cheever was an American short-story writer and novelist whose work describes, often through fantasy and ironic comedy, the life, manners, and morals of middle-class suburban America. Cheever has been...
American composer
Elliott Carter was an American composer, a musical innovator whose erudite style and novel principles of polyrhythm, called metric modulation, won worldwide attention. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer...
American author
John Updike was an American writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, known for his careful craftsmanship and realistic but subtle depiction of “American, Protestant, small-town, middle-class” life....
American diplomat and historian
George F. Kennan was an American diplomat and historian best known for his successful advocacy of a “containment policy” to oppose Soviet expansionism following World War II. Upon graduation from Princeton...
American author
Edward Albee was an American dramatist and theatrical producer best known for his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which displays slashing insight and witty dialogue in its gruesome portrayal...
American poet
Robert Lowell, Jr. was an American poet noted for his complex, autobiographical poetry. Lowell grew up in Boston. James Russell Lowell was his great-granduncle, and Amy, Percival, and A. Lawrence Lowell...