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Nathaniel Parker Willis
Nathaniel Parker Willis 1806-67, American author, b. Portland, Maine, grad. Yale, 1827. He was editor of the periodical the Legendary and later of the Token before founding (1829) the American Monthly Magazine in Boston. In 1831 he merged his magazine with George Pope Morris's New-York Mirro...
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Tristram and Isolde
Tristram and Isolde , medieval romance. The earliest extant version (incomplete) was written (c.1185) by Thomas of Britain in Anglo-Norman French verse. About 1210, Gottfried von Strassburg wrote in German verse a version based on that of Thomas. The story, originally independent of the Arthurian l...
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Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys , pseud. of Gwen Williams, 1894-1979, English novelist, b. Dominica. Her novels, written in the 1930s, mercilessly exploit her own emotional life, depicting pretty, no-longer-young women who find themselves down and out in large European cities. Without work or funds, her characters mu...
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scabies
scabies , highly contagious parasitic skin disease caused by the itch mite ( Sarcoptes scabiei ). The disease is also known as itch. It is acquired through close contact with an infested individual or contaminated clothing and is most prevalent among those living in crowded and unhygienic conditions...
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Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon 1737-94, English historian, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His childhood was sickly, and he had little formal education but read enormously and omnivorously. He went at the age of 15 to Oxford, but was forced to leave because of his conversion to ...
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Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler , 1571-1630, German astronomer. From his student days at the Univ. of Tübingen, he was influenced by the Copernican teachings. From 1593 to 1598 he was professor of mathematics at Graz and while there wrote his Mysterium cosmographicum (1596). This work opened the way to frien...
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D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Lawrence), 1885-1930, English author, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century fiction.
Life
The son of a Nottingham coal miner, Lawrence was a sickly child, devoted to his refined but domineering mother, who insisted upon his education. He graduated from t...
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Thomas Beer
Thomas Beer 1889-1940, American author, b. Council Bluffs, Iowa, grad. Yale, 1911, and studied law at Columbia, 1911-13. He is best remembered for his biographies of Stephen Crane (1923) and Marcus (Mark) Hanna (1929) and his witty study of American manners in the 1890s, The Mauve Decade (1926). ...
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Edwin Powell Hubble
Edwin Powell Hubble 1889-1953, American astronomer, b. Marshfield, Mo. He did research (1914-17) at Yerkes Observatory, and joined (1919) the staff of Mt. Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, Calif., of which he became director. Building on V. M. Slipher 's discovery that galaxies had strong shifts to th...
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Sir William Edward Parry
Sir William Edward Parry , 1790-1855, British arctic explorer and rear admiral. He entered the navy at 13 and made his first voyage to the Arctic under Sir John Ross in 1818 in search of the Northwest Passage . He was then put in command of the Hecla and the Griper in an expedition (1819-20) ...
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