M.C. Escher (1898-1972) produced work that remains among the most widely reproduced and popular graphic art of the twentieth century. His brain-teasing prints use interlocking shapes, transforming creatures, and impossible architectures to...

Among modern American critics, M. H. Abrams ranks as one of the foremost defenders of humanistic and historical literary study. His two major works, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (1971), base their historical a...

M. P. Shiel's first book, Prince Zaleski (1895), opens with a short story called "The S. S." It is a mystery concerning a series of apparent suicides which are revealed to be murders perpetrated by the "Spartan Society," a group dedicated ...

Ma Yüan (active ca. 1190-ca. 1229) was a Chinese painter. With Hsia Kuei, he was one of the creators of the Ma-Hsia school of landscape painting and one of the great masters of the Southern Sung period. Ma Yüan, also called Ch'in...

When Hamilton Wright Mabie died, the man assigned to write his obituary for the New York Globe dawdled for several days before producing a single unpublishable sentence: "Hamilton Wright Mabie conducted young ladies into the suburbs of cul...

Macbeth (died 1057) was king of Scotland from 1040 to 1057. Although he is best known through the Shakespearean drama bearing his name, his historical importance lies in the fact that he was the last Celtic king of Scotland. The career of ...

Cynthia Macdonald is best known for the grotesque imagery and sardonic tone in her poems. She is the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a contributor to numerous anthologies of contemporary verse. Both her subject matter and ...

Eleanor Josephine Macdonald (born 1906) has been a pioneer in the field of cancer epidemiology. Over the course of forty years, she made several significant contributions to the understanding of cancer and was a strong advocate for early t...

A relatively minor poet known for being romantic, ornate, and rhetorical, Wilson Pugsley MacDonald retains a small coterie of enthusiasts even to the present. Known mainly in his own time for his considerable platform abilities in a series...

The older brother of Antonio Machado, Manuel was the more famous poet during the early years of the twentieth century. After a stay in Paris he brought the full force of modernism home to Spain with his adaptations in Spanish verse of symb...

While little is known of the life of Roland MacIlmaine, he figures prominently in the development of English Ramism because his was the first translation of the Ramist dialectic into English. Just two years after the Huguenot reformer Petr...

Mack Gordon turned out musical hits for Hollywood with almost machine-like regularity. In the 1930s, with composer Harry Revel, and in the 1940s, with composers Harry Warren and Josef Myrow, he wrote lyrics to nearly 120 hit songs, more th...

The American silent-screen producer and director Mack Sennett (1884-1960) is frequently considered the originator of film comedy. He perfected the art of silent-screen slapstick in his "Keystone" series. Mack Sennett was born Michael Sinno...

On 21 September 1924 the New York Herald Tribune began publishing a Sunday book review supplement which included a column called "Notes for Bibliophiles." Leonard Leopold Mackall, a collector and independent scholar living most of the time...

Because of the unrivaled popularity of her novels from 1886 to 1924, Marie Corelli (pseudonym for Mary "Minnie" MacKay) demands attention of both social and literary historians. Full and accurate sales comparisons do not exist for the late...

When Walter Macken died in 1967, Ireland lost one of her most respected and successful novelists and short-story writers, an author who enjoyed a wide reputation as a fiction writer not only at home but also in the United States and (throu...

William Mackenzie collected books for the sake of their rarity, age, or beauty. By the time he died in 1828, he had assembled one of the largest private libraries in the United States. It was the most valuable collection of antiquarian boo...

William Wellington Mackey's plays address the questions and debates raised by the black nationalism movements of the 1960s. Mackey focuses his attacks on the black middle class and explores the ways in which the various generations, sexes,...

Carolyn Mackler has written two young adult novels featuring ordinary girls who feel awkward about themselves and are trying to find a place in their world. "So many of us feel like we don't fit in, that we're inferior to others," Mackler ...

George Maclean (1801-1847) was a Scottish solider and agent of British imperial expansion. As an administrator of the British-owned Gold Coast forts, he was instrumental in extending British influence in the interior of present-day Ghana. ...

Maclyn McCarty is a distinguished bacteriologist who has done important work on the biology of Streptococci and the origins of rheumatic fever, but he is best known for his involvement in early experiments which established the function of...

Jeanie Macpherson was thirty-two years old when she met Cecil B. De Mille, the director with whom she would be most closely identified. Though it was through De Mille that she would become known as a screenwriter, Macpherson had already en...

As a prolific editor, educator, translator, and biographer, Frank MacShane has dedicated his career to documenting the lives and accomplishments of those writers "with substantial followings and many enthusiastic champions," but who are no...

One of the most influential occult thinkers of the nineteenth century, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891)left behind conflicting images of adventuress, author, mystic, guru, occultist, and charlatan. With the aid of Col. Henry Olcott an...

Although Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, comtesse d'Aulnoy, did not begin her brief, thirteen-year literary career until the age of thirty-nine or forty, she rapidly became one of the most popular and influential authors of the tur...