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Sir William Henry Perkin
Sir William Henry Perkin 1838-1907, English chemist. In 1856 he discovered the first aniline dye (aniline purple, known as mauve and mauveine); by founding a factory to make it, Perkin established the aniline dye industry in England. He was knighted in 1906. His son, William Henry Perkin, Jr., ...
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860-1935, American feminist and reformer, b. Hartford, Conn.; great-granddaughter of Lyman Beecher . Prominent as a lecturer and writer on the labor movement and feminism, she edited the Forerunner, a liberal journal. She wrote many works on social and economic problems...
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Anne Sullivan Macy
Anne Sullivan Macy 1866-1936, American educator, friend and teacher of Helen Keller , b. Feeding Hills, Mass. Placed in Tewksbury almshouse (1876), she was later admitted (1880) to Perkins Institution for the Blind, since her eyes had been seriously weakened by a childhood infection. Although a se...
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Perkin Warbeck
Perkin Warbeck 1474?-1499, pretender to the English throne, b. Tournai. He lived in Flanders and later in Portugal and arrived in Ireland in the employ of a silk merchant in 1491. There adherents of the Yorkist party persuaded him to impersonate Richard, duke of York, the younger brother of Edward...
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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings 1896-1953, American author, b. Washington, D.C., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1918. She was a journalist until 1928, when she moved to the Florida backwoods, where most of her novels are set. Cross Creek (1942) is a humorous autobiographical account of her life there. The Y...
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John Ford
John Ford 1586-c.1640, English dramatist, b. Devonshire. He went to London to study law but was never called to the bar. The early part of his playwriting career was taken up with collaborations, primarily with Dekker. His three major tragedies, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Broken Heart, and Lov...
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Frances Wright
Frances Wright (Fanny Wright), 1795-1852, Scottish-American reformer, later known as Mme Darusmont, b. Dundee, Scotland. After her first tour (1818-20) of the United States she wrote an enthusiastic account of her travels, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). In 1824 she returned to th...
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Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins 1882-1965, U.S. Secretary of Labor (1933-45), b. Boston. She worked at Hull House, was executive secretary of the New York Consumers' League (1910-12) and of the New York Committee on Safety (1912-17), and directed (1912-13) investigations for the New York state factory commission. ...
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Thomas Clayton Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe 1900-1938, American novelist, b. Asheville, N.C., grad. Univ. of North Carolina, 1920, M.A. Harvard, 1922. An important 20th-century American novelist, Wolfe wrote four mammoth novels, which, while highly autobiographical, present a sweeping picture of American life. He was the...
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Samuel Gridley Howe
Samuel Gridley Howe 1801-76, American reformer and philanthropist, b. Boston, Mass., grad. Brown, 1821, M.D. Harvard, 1824. He began his life-long service to others by going to Greece to aid in its war for independence and spent six years there. He is best remembered for his work with the blind; he...
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