?Most directors have one film for which they are known or possibly two,” said Francis Ford Coppola. ?Akira Kurosawa has eight or nine.” Through masterpieces such as Kagemusha, Seven Samurai, and High
Muhammad was a religious visionary and political leader. Raised in the harsh Arabian Peninsula and orphaned while still a child, this unlikely leader and military genius received a calling to transfor
From his emergence as the Bohemian 'gymnopediste' of fin-de-siecle Montmartre to his encounters with the Dada movement after World War I, composer Erik Satie famously flaunted convention, His reputati
Joseph Beuys is one of the most important and controversial German artists of the late twentieth century, an artist whose persona and art is so tightly interwoven with Germany’s fascist past—Beuys was
Few individuals have made as much of an impact upon a single medium as has Sergei Eisenstein upon cinema. His ground-breaking movies, such as "Battleship Potemkin", "October and Aleksandr Nevskii" mak
Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl,” written in 1955, is one of the defining works of the Beat Generation, despite having been labeled obscene when it was first published. A harsh denunciation of Americ
Few artists have exerted as much influence on modern art as Paul Cezanne. Picasso, Braque, and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting, and many historians regard him as the father of
Sometimes referred to as the “Father of Biogeography,” Alfred Russel Wallace has come to be known as the co-originator of the theory of evolution through natural selection, and he also wro
After Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) is the man most associated with communism and its influence and reach around the world. Lenin was the leader of the communist Bolshevik party during the Oct
He was relatively unknown in his lifetime, but Karl Marx’s theories about society, economics, and politics changed the world, led to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union and th
American writer, composer, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912–92) is best known for his experimental composition 4’33,” a musical score in which the performer does not play an instrument during t
With a career in literature and art spanning more than sixty years, John Berger is characterized by an independent and anti-institutional approach to creativity. Working in a range of media including
Herman Melville is hailed as one of the greats—if not the greatest—of American literature. Born in New York in 1819, he first achieved recognition for his daring stylistic innovations, but
