Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (1837-1921) was the first African American to become governor of a state. Although he was not elected by popular vote, P. B. S. Pinchback advanced to the governor's office in Louisiana when political turmo...

Illustrator and graphic novelist P. Craig Russell has blended a love of classical opera with artwork noted for its lush line, attention to detail, and classical themes to create graphic-novel adaptations of musical works ranging from The M...

Peter Fredrick Strawson (born 1919) was regarded as one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century. He was especially active in the movement known as ordinary language philosophy. Sir Peter Fredrick Strawson was born November 2...

One of the most distinguished of the English novelists who began their careers immediately following World War II is Percy Howard Newby. His sizable body of work is notable for seriousness of themes, mastery of fictional techniques and con...

P. K. Page, in a career that has lasted for almost half a century, has shown herself a Protean writer, continually overstepping the boundaries of genre and category. She has written a romantic novel, a number of novellas and short stories,...

P. N. Furbank has written three literary biographies: lives of Italo Svevo, E. M. Forster, and Denis Diderot. The first has made a neglected Italian writer more widely known; the last has clarified the myriad complexities of a famous Frenc...

An American army officer and Confederate general, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818-1893) became a hero in the South with his capture of Fort Sumter and his victory at the First Battle of Bull Run. He was one of the Confederacy's eig...

In protest of dictatorships throughout the world, including the totalitarian Francisco Franco regime in Spain, cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) refused in 1946 to ever perform on stage again. He eventually returned to playing for audiences...

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism, he established the basis f...

The Austro-German painter and wood carver Michael Pacher (ca. 1435-1498) amalgamated north Italian perspective and northern realism to produce a uniquely personal style of painting. Born in a town near the Austro-Italian border, Michael Pa...

With the birth of television in the late 1940s came a new medium through which writers could reach varied audiences. Paddy Chayefsky recognized the scope of this medium and produced some remarkable television plays, including Marty (1953) ...

An accomplished poet, a novelist of much promise, and an editor/publisher of energy and generosity, Ernesto Padilla is currently an assistant professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield. Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico,...

Chebyshev has given his name to results in probabilityand analysis, one of the first Russian mathematicians by birth to be so recognized. His work reflected a great deal of mathematical sophistication, making connections between different ...

Francis Edward Paget is best known as one of the writers of Tractarian fiction, those children's and adult texts produced by members of the Oxford Movement that were intended to illustrate the doctrines of the Anglican High Church. Paget a...

Philip Pain may well be the most shadowy figure in all of American literature; nothing is known of his birth, his family, or his place of residence, and all we know of his death comes from the title page of his only book, where we are told...

Aldo Palazzeschi (nom de plume of Aldo Giurlani) began his literary career in search of a new mode of literary expression. Two literary/art movements,crepuscolarismo (twilight poetry) and futurismo, provided the tolerant atmosphere necessa...

Known to young readers all over the world as creator of the Brownies, Palmer Cox was one of the most popular American writers for children in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A professional illustrator as well as a writer, h...

Joe H. Palmer belonged to that rarest class of sportswriters: those whose writing can interest readers with no initial interest in the particular sport. During his six years as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune his writing always...

Jacob Paludan was one of Denmark's foremost novelists in the 1920s, and the two parts of his novel, first published as Torden i Syd: Jørgen Stein og hans Kreds (1932) and Under Regnbuen: Jørgen Stein og hans Kreds (1933), the...

Among modern novelists, Pamela Hansford Johnson is likely to be remembered best for her stylistic lucidity and psychological acumen. In an age of experimental novelistic techniques often intended to draw attention to themselves, Johnson's ...

When science fiction author Pamela Sargent was a young girl growing up in Ithaca, New York, she met two people who would have a great impact upon her chosen career. One was her baby-sitter Audrey, and the other was Bobby Swayze, a boy who ...

Avdot'ia Iakovlevna Panaeva's significance as a writer of fiction has long been eclipsed by her literary and artistic memoirs, written toward the end of her life in the late 1880s and detailing the lives of the writers associated with the ...

A master of farce, Leif Panduro made his literary mark in novels, motion pictures, television, and radio drama--virtually every genre except critical essay and lyric poetry. Panduro's strengths as a writer lie in dramatic technique and in ...

One of the prominent writers of the post-World War II period in Soviet literature, Vera Panova gained fame and the esteem of Soviet readers for her short novel Sputniki (1946; translated as The Train, 1948). Sputniki offers a close and com...

Paolo Ruffini made significant contributions in the areas of medicine and philosophy, as well as mathematics, where he developed the theory that a quintic equation cannot be solved by radicals. This theory later came to be known as the Abe...