Short Biography of Emile Zola

Emile Edouard Charles Antoine Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and social reformer. With La Fortune des RougonlThe Fortune of the Rougons 1867 he began a series of some 20 naturalistic...

Short Biography of Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Thomas Wilson (1856-1924) was the 28th president of the USA 1913-1921, a Democrat. He kept the USA out of World War I until 1917, and in January 1918 issued his "Fourteen Points"...

Short Biography of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was a Irish writer. With his flamboyant style and quotable conversation, he dazzled London society and, on his lecture tour in 1882...

Short Biography of Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet who published Leaves of Grass in 1855, which contains the symbolic "Song of Myself", it used unconventional free verse (with no rhyme...

Short Biography of George Washington

George Washington (1732-1799) was the first president of the USA 1789-1797. As a strong opponent of the British government's policy, he sat in the Continental Congresses of 1774 and...

Short Biography of Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German opera composer. He revolutionized the 19th-century conception of opera, envisaging it as a wholly new art form in which musical, poetic, and...

Short Biography of Voltaire

Pen name of Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) was a French writer, who devoted himself to tolerance, justice, and humanity. He was threatened with arrest for Lettres philosophiques...

Short Biography of Josip Broz Tito

Tito adopted name of Josip Broz (1892-1980) was a Yugoslav soldier and communist politician. In World War II he organized the National Liberation Army to carry on guerrilla warfare...

Short Biography of Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a Irish satirist and Anglican cleric, author of Gulliver's Travels (1726), an allegory describing travel to lands inhabited by giants, miniature people...

Short Biography of August Strindberg

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright and novelist. His plays, influential in the development of dramatic technique, are in a variety of styles including historical...

Short Biography of Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss (1864-1949) was a German composer and conductor. He followed the German Romantic tradition but had a strongly personal style, characterized by his bold, colourful...

Short Biography of Stendhal

Pen name of Marie Henri Beyle (1783-1842) was a French novelist. His two major novels Le Rouge et le noir/The Red and the Black in 1830 and La Chartreuse de Par me/The Charterhouse...

Short Biography of Socrates

Socrates c.469-399 BC was an Athenian philosopher. He wrote nothing but was immortalized in the dialogues of his pupil, Plato. In his desire to combat the scepticism of the sophists...

Short Biography of Alfred Sisley

Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) was a French Impressionist painter, known for his views of Port-Marly and the Seine, which he painted during floods in 1876. Sisley studied in an academic...

Short Biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a English lyric poet, a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Expelled from Oxford for atheism, he fought all his life against religion and for...

Short Biography of George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a famous Irish dramatist. He was also a critic and novelist, and an early member of the socialist Fabian Society. His plays combine comedy with...

Short Biography of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a famous English dramatist and poet. Established in London by 1589 as an actor and a playwright, he was England's unrivalled dramatist until his...

Short Biography of Salman Rushdie

Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born in 1947) is a British writer, born in India of a Muslim family. His novel The Satanic Verses in 1988 (the title refers to verses deleted from the Koran)...

Short Biography of Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was the 26th president of the USA 1901-1909 and a Republican. After serving as governor of New York 1898-1900 he became vice president to OMcKinley...

Short Biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a French Impressionist painter. He met Monet and Sisley in the early 1860s and together they formed the nucleus of the Impressionist movement....

Short Biography of Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004) was an American Republican politician, governor of California (1966-1974), president (1981-1989) and a former Hollywood actor, Reagan was a hawkish...

Short Biography of Plato

Plato (c.428-347 BC) was a Greek philosopher, pupil of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, and founder of the Academy. He was the author of philosophical dialogues on such topics as...

Short Biography of Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist who discovered that fermentation was caused by microorganisms. He also developed a vaccine for rabies, which led to...

Short Biography of Claude Monet

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French painter, a pioneer of Impressionism and a lifelong exponent of its ideals; his painting Impression, Sunrise in 1872 gave the movement its name....