S. J. Perelman (1904-1979) was probably the funniest American writer of the 20th century. He was a master of word-play and a cultural parodist without equal. S. J. Perelman was once described in these graphic terms: Under a forehead roughl...

Samuel Sidney McClure (1857-1949) created the first literary syndicate and developed "muckraking," which established him as one of America's notable editors. Born in County Antrim, Ireland, on Feb. 17, 1857, S. S. McClure was taken to the ...

The Jewish scholar Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayumi (882-942) ranks as the most important medieval Jewish scholar of literature and history. Little is known of the early life of Saadia ben Joseph except that he was born in Egypt, lived for some...

Nicola Sacco (died 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927), Italian-born anarchists, became the subject of one of America's most celebrated controversies and the focus for much of the liberal and radical protest of the 1920s in the Unite...

A Victorian woman writer whose voluminous fiction has escaped canonization, Mary Anne Sadlier was famous in her day for didactic, sentimental romances promoting the causes of Catholicism and Irish culture in North America. Henry J. Morgan ...

Robert Sage, journalist, editor, and translator, worked in the Paris,Vienna, Rome, and London offices of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald for most of his life; from September 1927 to June 1929 he was also an editor for transitio...

Saicho (767-822) was a Japanese Buddhist monk who bore the posthumous title Dengyo daishi. He was the founder in Japan of the Tendai sect, which he imported after a period of study in China. In 783 the emperor Kammu decided to remove his c...

The Japanese rebel and statesman Takamori Saigo (1827-1877) was the military leader of the Meiji restoration. His eventual revolt against the Meiji government in 1877 represented the resistance of the old warrior class to the swift and oft...

St. Cajetan (1480-1547), who was born Gaetano da Thiene, was one of the earliest Italian Catholic reformers of the 16th century. He was a cofounder of the Clerks Regular, a religious order popularly known as the Theatines. Cajetan was born...

The Spanish churchman St. Dominic (ca. 1170-1221) founded the Dominican order, a religious community officially called the Order of Preachers. Dominic was born to the well-to-do Guzmán family in the town of Caleruega in northern Spa...

The fame achieved by Roman Catholic saint, Nicholas of Myra (died 345 AD) has continued to grow since his imprisonment and subsequent death at the hands of the Roman Emperor, Diocletian. The much-loved figure that we associate with the Chr...

St. Peter (died ca. 65) is traditionally considered to be the head of Jesus' 12 Apostles and the first bishop of Rome. Peter's original name was Simon, Peter being a name given him by Jesus. At the time of Jesus' public life, Peter was a g...

The Greek missionaries Saints Cyril (827-869) and Methodius (825-885) were the apostles of the Slavic peoples. Preaching Christianity in the native language, they brought the Slavic countries firmly into the sphere of the Christian Church....

Saladin (1138-1193), a Kurdish ruler of Egypt and Syria, is known in the West for his opposition to the forces of the Third Crusade and for his capture of Jerusalem. From about 1130 Zengi, the Turkish atabeg (regent) of Mosul and his son, ...

Harold J. Salemson was a very young American writer in Paris at the close of the twenties and one of the few whose work grew largely out of a French education. Unlike the expatriates who went to Paris "to live cheaply and be able to write ...

C. Sallustius Crispus, Rome's first great historian, entered public life in the crisis of Rome's external expansion and internal revolution; he retired from that public life to write history that survived, in part, the fall of the Empire a...

The Swedish engineer and Arctic balloonist Salomon August Andrée (1854-1897) attempted the first balloon flight to the North Pole in 1897, but the three-man team perished. Salomon August Andrée was born in Grenna, Sweden, on ...

The Spanish painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the best-known and most flamboyant surrealist artists. Possessed with an enormous facility for drawing, he painted his dreams and bizarre moods in a precise illusionistic fashion. Sa...

Salvador Luria was born on August 13, 1912, in Turin, Italy. In 1929, he entered medical school there and soon developed a technical facility for culturing cells; that is, he was able to grow cells in artificial media inside culture dishes...

The Italian poet, translator, and critic Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was one of the chief exponents of Italian hermetic poetry. Salvatore Quasimodo was born on Aug. 20, 1901, in Modica, Sicily, where his father was a stationmaster with...

Sam Giancana was born on May 24, 1908 to Sicilian immigrants Antonio and Antonia Giancana in Chicago's Little Italy. As a child, Giancana was frequently subjected to the violent discipline of his father. At age six, his father beat him wit...

Shafiihuna Nujoma (born 1929) led the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO) from exile for almost 30 years. In 1989 he became the first president of independent Namibia. Shafiihuna (Sam) Nujoma was born May 12, 1929, in the Ongan...

Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn (1882-1961) served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives longer than any man in the nation's history. Sam Rayburn was born in Roane County, Tenn., on Jan. 6, 1882, the eighth of 11 children. When he was ...

Early on July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, who was thirty-one and pregnant with her second child, was murdered in her bed. Evidence later indicated that the assailant may have raped her before killing her. Marilyn's husband, thirty-one-year-...

Samuel Zemurray (1877-1961), a Russian-born American fruit importer, in a classic "rags to riches" career built the United Fruit Company into a powerful international corporation. The economic power of his banana companies dwarfed the Cent...