Joseph B. Danquah (1895-1965) was a Ghanaian political leader and a principal founder of the Gold Coast nationalist movement. As a scholar, he sought to accommodate the best of his country's tribal past to modernity. Joseph B. Danquah was ...

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) was an English biologist who utilized mathematical analysis to study genetic phenomena and their relation to evolution. Born at Oxford on Nov. 5, 1892, J. B. S. Haldane was the son of John Scott Ha...

The entire body of writing by which Jerome David Salinger wishes to be known is contained in four small books—one novel and thirteen short stories. All of these were published in the eleven and a half years between January 1948 and J...

The English physicist Sir Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940) is credited with the discovery of the electron. On Dec. 18, 1856, J. J. Thomson was born at Cheetham Hill near Manchester. His father, a bookseller and publisher, planned a career i...

If Sir James M. Barrie had written no play other than Peter Pan (1904), the extraordinary and enduring popularity of this single work would testify to his talents as a dramatist. As it stands, however, the more than forty plays he wrote al...

The literary career of J.P. Donleavy (born 1926) has spanned nearly 50 years, though he is most famous for his first novel, The Ginger Man. James Patrick Donleavy was born on April 23, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Irish im...

John Pierpont Morgan II (1867-1943), American banker, headed J. P. Morgan & Company, one of the most prestigious private banking firms in the world. Born in Irvington, New York, on Sept. 7, 1867, J. P. Morgan II was the only son of the...

Electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995)invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, with John William Mauchly. Further collaboration between the two engineers led to the development of the first comm...

The Canadian humanitarian, reformer, and political leader James Shaver Woodsworth (1874-1942) contributed significant observations on the life of immigrants to Canada and fought vigorously for social reforms in Parliament. Born near Toront...

Julius Caesar Watts (born 1957), a conservative African American politician and former football player, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. His victory represents the first time that a black Republican from a Southern...

John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878-1966) was a prodigious writer of world and military history, and one of the progenitors of tank warfare strategy during and after World War I. John Frederick Charles Fuller's career in the British milita...

The American politician Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (1815-1903) was the main force behind improved education in the South in the latter half of the 19th century. Born on June 5, 1815, in Lincoln County, Ga., J. L. M. Curry was the son of a sl...

Comedian Jack Benny (1894-1974) was one of the top stars of radio, television, and stage in a career which spanned over 50 years. A master of comic timing, Benny changed the nature of the weekly comedy show on radio and his likeable skinfl...

Jack Johnson (1878-1946) became the first African American heavyweight champion after winning the crown from Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia on December 26, 1908. As a result of this victory, he became the center of a bitter racial contro...

Jack Kerouac, regarded in modern American fiction as the authentic voice of the "beat genera- don," thought of himself as a storyteller in the innovative literary tradition of Proust and Joyce, creating an original style that he envisioned...

For more than four decades, whether working in comedy or tragedy, actor Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) epitomized the joys and travails of Americans in the latter half of the 20th century. Noted as one of the most versatile U.S. film actors of hi...

For most of the past 30 years Jack Nicklaus (born 1940) has been considered golf's greatest. His longevity has proved equal to Arnold Palmer's, and only Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones can be considered players in Nicklaus's league. In numbers o...

With his three brothers, Jack Warner (1892-1978) founded Warner Brothers movie studio, one of Hollywood's premiere forces during the studio era. Warner was also an influential movie producer, responsible for 5,000 films over the course of ...

Best known for his role in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, Jackie Coogan (1914-1984) was one of the first and best known child actors. Because of the legal problems Coogan faced in obtaining the money he earned as a child star, the California l...

Multitalented athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee (born 1962) was one of the top American track stars of the 1980s and 1990s, winning numerous Olympic medals and setting or tying records in several events. She was the first American ever to win a...

American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was the leading figure in abstract expressionism, a style that evolved after World War II and radicalized the history of American painting and modern art in general. Before World War II modern p...

Jacob Cats (1577-1660), seventeenth-century poet, moralist, and statesman, was one of the leading poets in the golden age of Dutch literature. His emblem books, which reflected a stolid Calvinist philosophy, exhorted readers to virtuous an...

The American-born English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), known principally for his expressively modeled portrait busts, periodically returned to direct carving throughout his career, predominantly drawing on biblical themes. Born ...

The Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1628-1682) raised to the highest level of quality and variety the painting of landscapes based on the observation of the visible world. Jacob van Ruisdael was born in Haarlem, the son of t...

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was an African-American painter whose works depict his passionate concern for the plight of his people. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 7, 1917, Jacob Lawrence was reared in Harlem in New York Cit...