Yashar Kemal (born 1922) was the most successful and most widely known of modern Turkish novelists. His works, which also include short stories and essays, are local in color and infused with the spirit of Turkish folk traditions. They sho...

Aritomo Yamagata (1838-1922) was a Japanese general and a member of the oligarchy which dominated Meiji Japan. He was instrumental in building a modern army, strengthening the power of the civil and military bureaucracy, and checking the d...

The Chinese warlord Yen Hsi-shan (1883-1960) ruled Shansi Province in northwest China from 1911 to 1949. Because of his program of reforms, Shansi was dubbed the "model province." Yen Hsi-shan was born in the village of Ho-pien not far fro...

Abu Yusuf Yakub al-Mansur (reigned 1184-1199) was the third caliph of the Almohad dynasty and the victor against the Spanish Christians at the battle of Alarcos. Abu Yusuf served as vizier of the Almohad empire during the reign of his fath...

Yasser Arafat (born 1929) was elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Though originally an advocate of all-out guerrilla war, from 1974 on he and the PLO sometimes seemed to be seeking a negotiated resolu...

Minoru Yasui (1917-1987) was a lawyer who fought for the civil rights of Japanese Americans during World War II, most notably he argued about the unconstitutionality of the internment camps. During the early 1900s, many Japanese people mov...

Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was a distinguished Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature for exemplifying in his writings the Japanese mind. Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka on June 11, 1899, into a cultured family, his...

As a cosmopolitan man of letters, Inoue Yasushi established a reputation as a poet, journalist, and fiction writer, although he is best known as a novelist. He was a major introducer and interpreter of the Silk Road phenomenon in Japan, an...

The fiction of Chinese American poet and art critic John Yau is best understood as the transformation of a personal dilemma into a formal imperative; that is, his experience of feeling outside both his own ancestry and the American culture...

Of all the plebeian female poets of the eighteenth century, Ann Yearsley, the "milkwoman of Bristol," most repays detailed historical study. Her sizable oeuvre, competence across genres, and varied contemporary critical reception give her ...

Yegor Kuz'mich Ligachev (born 1920) was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union beginning in 1966. During the 1980s he became a leading advocate of a more conservative approach to perestroika but was ou...

The Spanish Hebrew poet and religious thinker Judah Halevi (ca. 1085-ca. 1150) taught that God had revealed Himself primarily through the people of Israel. Few definite facts are known about Judah Halevi. He was born in Toledo, Castile, to...

Writer, autobiographer, journalist, and public figure, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova was one of the first women in Europe to hold governmental office. In 1783 she was appointed director of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences a...

The Russian Cossack soldier Emelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (1742-1775) led the peasant rebellion in Russia in 1773-1775. Emelyan Pugachev, a Don Cossack, was born in the village of Zimoveiskaya. The main course of his life was influenced initi...

Countess Evdokiia Rostopchina, who sometimes used the pseudonyms Iasnovidiashchaia (Clairvoyant) and Russkaia zhenshchina (A Russian Woman), was one of the most popular female poets of nineteenth-century Russia. Undoubtedly talented, she u...

Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko (born 1933), the most popular of contemporary Russian poets, was the leading literary spokesman for the generation of Russians who grew to maturity after Stalin's death in 1953. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was bor...

Yi Hwang (1501-1570), Yi-dynasty philosopher, poet, scholar, and educator, was one of the greatest Korean Confucian philosophers, famous for his comprehensive studies of the great Sung Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi. Yi Hwang, whose lit...

"There were three overwhelming passions which governed the life of Bertrand Russell," said E. Y. "Yip" Harburg in 1970, in a talk in the "Lyrics and Lyricists" series at the 92nd Street Y in New York: The longing for love, the search for k...

Yitzak Shamir (born 1914) was prime minister of Israel (1983-84, 1987-88), leader of the Likud Party and vice premier and minister of foreign affairs in the National Unity government (1984-86). Yitzak Shamir (Yizernitsky) was born in 1914 ...

The Jewish teacher Johanan ben Zakkai (active ca. AD 70) was the leading expounder of Jewish law of his time. He founded an important academy at Yavneh. Johanan ben Zakkai was the youngest among the numerous disciples of the great Hillel a...

Yung-lo (1360-1424) was the third emperor of the Ming dynasty of China, and in his reign the dynasty reached the height of its power owing to his military prowess and civil reforms. A favorite son of Hung-wu, Chu Ti, whose reign title was ...

Yordan Yovkov has the reputation, along with Elin Pelin, of being one of the two outstanding Bulgarian prose writers in the period between the world wars. Of the many attempts to characterize him, "visionary realist," "dreamer," and "bard ...

Furui Yoshikichi, the youngest of four children, was born in Tokyo. Both his parents had come from Gifu Prefecture, where his father's family had been wealthy. During World War II the Furui home in Tokyo was bombed, and the family evacuate...

A. S. "Doc" Young, who never held a full-time job at a mainstream daily newspaper, established a legacy in sports journalism through his extensive contributions to black weekly newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines and his several bo...

For millions of sports fans--and for more than forty years--Dick Young was the premier sportswriter of the New York Daily News, the newspaper that traditionally has had the largest circulation in New York City. In the 1940s and 1950s the D...