Until he was twenty, Joseph Proust followed dutifully in his father's footsteps, learning chemistry from him and eventually becoming his apprentice in a pharmacy in Angers, France. But in 1774 Proust left for Paris, against his family's wishes and...

1754-1826 French chemist famous for discovering the law of constant proportions, or Proust's law, according to which pure samples of a compound always contain the same elements in definite proportions. His views contradicted Claude-Louis...

Joseph Louis Proust (September 26, 1754 - July 5, 1826) was a French...

THOREAU said, in his big bow-wow way, that a man should stand up to live before he sat down to write. Proust approved of Thoreau. Which was odd, for if Proust's way of life was formidably eccentric (the famous cork-lined room, a Noah's...

THE Soviet Union's most eminent poetin-exile, Joseph Brodsky, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. He was born in Leningrad in 1940 and went to the United States in 1972. He is currently Five Colleges Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College...