Zabdiel Boylston (1679-1766) was the first American physician to use inoculation against smallpox in 1721 during a Boston epidemic. Zabdiel Boylston was born March 9, 1679, near the present city of Brookline, Mass., and studied medicine wi...

"Du bist uns kaum entwichen, und schwermütig ziehen / Aus dumpfen Höhlen . . . Verdruß und Langeweile" (You have only just disappeared, and heavily rise / Frustration and boredom ... from musty caves). Johann Wolfgang Goeth...

Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), twelfth president of the United States, was, as one of the two military heroes of the Mexican War, the last Whig president. Living in a time when generals were politically appointed and the Army poorly trained, ...

One of the best-known writers of the 1820s and 1830s, Mikhail Nikolaevich Zagoskin started his literary career as a successful playwright and subsequently worked in several other prose genres, but he is remembered primarily as an historica...

The poetry and the poetic plays of Dane Zajc brought a significant change into Slovene literature after World War II. Together with Gregor Strnisa and Veno Taufer, at the end of the 1950s Zajc opted for poetry whose goal is not a sentiment...

Mara Zalite represents the generation of Latvian writers that matured as artists under Soviet occupation. There are signs of political and intellectual malaise with the constraints of that regime in her own early poetry as well as in her c...

A writer of prose, as well as a literary critic, editor, and outspoken defender of the environment, Sergei Zalygin had a long and prolific career. Zalygin wrote short stories, essays, novellas, and novels. Although Zalygin is best known fo...

Herbert Zand, who was drafted into the German army and severely wounded on the eastern front during World War II, wrote a war novel and a novel on postwar Vienna, and many of his essays and stories explore the effects of Hitler and the war...

The Spanish biochemist Federico Mayor Zaragosa (born 1934) served on various medical and scientific advisory committees and in the Spanish government before beginning his association with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and...

A prolific and long-lived writer of narodnik (populist) orientation, Pavel Vladimirovich Zasodimsky was actively involved in Russian literary life from the late 1860s until his death in 1912. He contributed to (and at times helped edit) th...

Shaykh Zayid bin Sultan Al-Nahyan (born 1923) served for 18 years as the governor of the Buraimi Oasis and for five years as the ruler of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of the Trucial States, before becoming president of the United Arab Emi...

In many ways Zbigniew Herbert is a paradigmatic twentieth-century Eastern European poet. His life and poetry, like the fate of his native country and the history of the region, were indelibly marked by the experiences of World War II and o...

Zebulon Baird Vance (1830-1894), U.S. senator and congressman, was Civil War governor of North Carolina. He is best known for his concern for the common Southerner and his noncooperation with Confederate authorities. Zebulon Vance was born...

In the autobiographical notes accompanying Paul Zech's contributions to the famous verse anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn and Dusk of Mankind, 1920), edited by Kurt Pinthus, the poet writes of the self-imposed challenge that c...

In the foreword to Talking Cure (1982) Cynthia McDonald calls Lisa Zeidner's poetry "fugal": "The new lines enter, extending the work past the natural stopping point of each phase so the poems continually re-engage." Zeidner's repetition a...

Zenna Henderson (nee Chlarson) was born in the foothills of the South Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona. She grew up in a strongly religious atmosphere that has had a profound effect on her writing. Henderson received a B.A. from Ari...

Zeno of Elea (born ca. 490 BC) was a Greek philosopher and logician. A member of the Eleatic school of philosophy, he was famous throughout antiquity for the rigorously logical and devastating arguments which he used to show the absurditie...

The history of modern fiction in Japan is inextricably tied to the "I-novel," an autobiographical, often confessional genre that developed early in the twentieth century as both an extension of the traditional Japanese preference for lyric...

Only since the 1960s has an overall positive picture emerged regarding Philipp von Zesen's contributions to German language and literature. For hundreds of years, beginning during his own lifetime, Zesen was scorned and mocked; he seemed d...

Chang Chih-tung (1837-1909) was a Chinese official and reformer. A brilliant Confucian scholar, he was convinced of the peerless quality of China's traditional culture. However, to preserve it, he introduced Western-type industry, educatio...

The Chinese painter Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322) was a high official under the Yüan dynasty, 1279-1369, and helped to establish the tradition of amateur scholarly painting, wen-jen-hua. Chao Meng-fu was born at Huchow in Chekiang Province...

Cheng Ho (1371-ca. 1433) was a eunuch in the service of the Ming emperor Yung-lo and commander in chief of the Chinese expeditionary fleet to the South Seas in the early years of the 15th century. Born into a family named Ma, presumably of...

Chou En-lai (1898-1976) was a Chinese Communist leader and premier of the People's Republic of China. From the 1920s on Chou was among the top leaders of the Chinese Communist party. Chou En-lai was born in Huaian, Kiangsu Province, into a...

Chu Hsi (1130-1200) was one of the greatest Chinese scholars and philosophers. The system of Neo-Confucianism of which Chu Hsi is regarded as the spokesman represents a summary of doctrines of his predecessors as well as original ideas of ...

A talented author of tales, novels, and a travelogue, Mar'ia Zhukova was quite popular with general readers and highly regarded by critics in the 1830s and 1840s. She made a significant contribution to the development of Russian prose fict...