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...

Chain store executive, pioneer in profit sharing, and philanthropist, J(ames) C(ash) Penney (1875-1971) built a corporate empire following business precepts based on the Golden Rule. The seventh of 12 children, only six of whom grew to mat...

Although John Desmond Bernal was highly instrumental in the pioneering stages of x-ray crystallography and microbiology, he is perhaps most well-known for his philosophical studies of the social aspects of science. Marxist in thinking and ...

A dedicated scholar and a gifted editor of Elizabethan literature, John Dover Wilson contributed to the disciplines of bibliography and textual criticism in England, earning a place among the ranks of the most prominent scholars of the twe...

During the first half of the twentieth century J. Frank Dobie collected and shared with American and British readers stories of the Texas brush country and northern Mexico. A writer, lecturer, humorist, raconteur, and goodwill ambassador f...

James Gordon Farrell's brief career as a novelist was marked by major literary prizes and the praise of contemporary critics, but was cut short by his untimely death. After some slight early works, he found his metier in three major novels...

When the poetry of Jeremy Prynne began to appear in England during the 1960s, it secured for itself a reputation and influence among independent and avant-garde poets that was not matched by its reception in the established centers of lite...

Joseph Hillis Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia, and was raised in upstate New York, the son of Nell Critzer Miller and Joseph Hillis Miller, the president of Keuka College from 1935 to 1941. Miller says of his background, in an in...

The name Michael Innes is synonymous with the witty, academic crime novel beloved in the British tradition of mystery fiction. His Inspector Appleby series, which was published over half a century, set a standard for decades and earned for...

J. J. C. Smart was one of the most important British philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, though during that period he worked almost entirely in Australia. He has been a leading figure in the development in philosophy ...

J. K. Rowling is a British author of novels for young people who caused an overnight sensation with her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which sold out of its first edition quickly and has been reprinted many times. Ev...

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 English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was one of the greatest romantic interpreters of nature in the history of Western art and is still unrivaled in the virtuosity of his painting of light. The son of a barber, J. ...

For work in cancer research, J. Michael Bishop shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Harold Varmus. He and Varmus found that cancer genes (oncogenes) could be derived from normal cell genes which had not been inherentl...

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...

James Ewell Brown Stuart (1833-1864), known as Jeb Stuart, ranks among the most effective cavalry officers in American military history for his exploits in the Civil War. Jeb Stuart was born in Patrick County, Va., on Feb. 6, 1833. Educate...

Jaan Kross entered Estonian literature as a poet in the mid 1950s; in the 1970s, however, he became famous for his historical fiction. The lives and times of notable Estonians from the past have remained his favorite subject. Kross has sai...

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...

Jack Henry Abbott is a convicted murderer who, upon winning parole through the efforts of author Norman Mailer, murdered another man one month later. Abbott's own collected writings, In the Belly of the Beast, were later discounted by many...

Jack Clemo's poetry is more often seen as a triumph against affliction than a literary success. His handicaps--physical, educational, social--have served, in place of criticism, as the measure of his art. Clemo has vigorously opposed this ...