U Nu (1907-1995) was the first prime minister of independent Burma (now called Myanmar) after freedom was obtained in 1948 from British colonial rule. He was also a leader of the Buddhist revival and a noted writer. After being ousted by t...

Yoshiko Uchida almost single-handedly created a body of Japanese-American literature for children, where none existed before. As the first Nissei writer to devote an entire career to writing for young people about her own rich cultural her...

The Italian author Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) was a poet, critic, and dramatist as well as a patriot. His romantic temperament and flamboyant life characterize his role as a key transitional figure in Italian literary history. Born Niccol&ogr...

Bodo Uhse's career as a writer was marked by the rise of National Socialism in Germany; by exile in France, Spain, the United States, and Mexico; and by the division of postwar Germany into two political and cultural entities. While Uhse w...

Ulf von Euler devoted his life to searching for the chemical signals that control physiological processes. In a career spanning six decades and during which he published four hundred and sixty-five scientific papers, von Euler achieved rem...

Julio G. Arce, who wrote as Jorge Ulica, was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He was the son of a prominent surgeon, Fortunato G. Arce. Although he studied pharmacy he had a preference for journalism. He founded two student newspapers, El hij...

B. George Ulizio's copy of the first edition of Sister Carrie (1900) bears Theodore Dreiser's inscription citing the collector's "vigorous and forthright approach to life." Dreiser indulged in understatement. Ulizio's capacity to dominate ...

The name Ulrich Bonnell Phillips is indelibly imprinted in the annals of American and Southern history. Not only was he the author or editor of nine major historical works but he also contributed numerous articles to professional journals,...

The German imperial knight and humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) advocated the dissolution of Germany's ties with the papacy. He advanced an unrealistic program, however, for solving German national problems by reversion to medieval k...

Ulysses Simpson Grant (1822-1885), having led the Northern armies to victory in the Civil War, was elected eighteenth president of the United States. As a general in the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant possessed the right qualities for prosecu...

Al-Hajj Omar ibn Said Tal (ca. 1797-1864) was a West African Moslem leader who started a holy war and established a far-reaching empire on the Upper Niger. Al-Hajj Omar was born in the Futa Toro near the town of Podar on the Senegal River....

Umberto Eco (born 1932) is a best-selling author of mystery novels that reflect his many intellectual interests and wide-ranging knowledge of philosophy, literature, medieval history, religion, and politics. His academic work in semiotics,...

Ambiguity or duality could be the dominant character of Umberto Saba's life and poetry. Even in his concept of a poet (stated in Scorciatoie e raccontini [Shortcuts and Small Tales. 1946]) Saba posits a duality of child/man, ever present a...

José Hipólito Unánue (1755-1833) was a Peruvian intellectual, educator, scientist, and journalist. He was one of the foremost physicians and thinkers of the transition period from the colonial to the independence era. ...

Mati Unt is a prominent prose writer, as well as a playwright, and has more recently become active as a stage director. He arrived on the literary scene in the early 1960s and was instrumental in introducing modernism into Soviet Estonian ...

An autodidact who rose from elementary-school teacher to director of the Language and Literature Institute at the Latvian Academy of Sciences, Andrejs Upits was a literary critic, theoretician, and historian who wrote poetry, short stories...

The following essay discusses Bertha Upton and her daughter Florence Upton. Few Americans are familiar with the Golliwogg, though some may know "Golliwog's Cakewalk"from Claude Debussy's Children's Corner suite (1908). The Oxford English D...

The writing of Milo Urban has been acknowledged by many literary critics and historians as a unique type of expressionism and the highlight of literary realism. His works are among the most frequently read and published Slovak literature o...

Urho Kekkonen (1900--1986) was Finland's president from 1956 to 1981. He kept the nation on a steady political course, despite continuing to keep that nation actively politically neutral to assure peaceful relations with its powerful neigh...

Uriah Stephens (1821-1882), American labor leader prominent in founding the Knights of Labor, remained its leader for a decade. Uriah Stephens was born in Cape May, N.J., on Aug. 3, 1821. He studied to be a Baptist preacher, but financial ...

A keen delight in language characterizes the work of Alurista, considered by many the poet laureate of Chicano letters. Possessing a noteworthy agility in English, Spanish, Náhuatl, and Maya, Alurista is equally at ease with both st...

Queen Urraca (c. 1078--1126), who ruled the Kingdom of Leon-Castilla (also known as Castille-Leon) in northern Spain from 1109 to 1126, was the only woman during the Spanish medieval era to rule in her own right. The failure of her politic...

Ursula K. Le Guin is a writer of great versatility and power, acclaimed for her science fiction, fantasy, and children's literature. All her fiction is distinguished by careful craftsmanship, a limpid prose style, realistic detail in the c...

Johannes Urzidil became widely known in the 1950s as a writer of short stories; he also distinguished himself as a literary historian and critic with publications on Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, and Franz Kafka. Urzidil was born in Prague in ...

Gleb Uspensky was highly politicized during the Soviet era as Vladimir Lenin's favorite narodnik (Populist), but in the West and in post-Soviet Russia he is one of the most neglected and least studied nineteenth-century Russian Realist wri...