Music, film, literature, painting, theater, the cultural works that define modern artistic life.
After decades of struggle, Jerry Siegel's public campaign in 1975 won him and Joe Shuster lifetime payments and restored their credit as the creators of Superman, a landmark for the rights of comic artists and writers.
Read the full story →Writer Jerry Siegel created Superman as a defender of ordinary people who took on abusive husbands, war profiteers and slum housing, and in doing so launched the superhero genre.
Read the full story →Artist Joe Shuster designed Superman's costume and appearance, creating the visual template that superheroes have followed ever since.
Read the full story →Before Superman, Joe Shuster drew Doctor Occult and Slam Bradley for the young publisher that became DC Comics, helping turn comic books into a medium for new, original stories.
Read the full story →In 1919 Joel Spingarn helped found the publishing house Harcourt, Brace and Company, served as its literary adviser and edited its 25-volume European Library.
Read the full story →In a 1910 Columbia lecture called The New Criticism, Joel Spingarn argued that each work of art should be judged afresh, on its own terms.
Read the full story →Joseph Brodsky, who never finished school, became a professor of literature and taught at Mount Holyoke College for fifteen years.
Read the full story →As US Poet Laureate from 1991, Joseph Brodsky urged that cheap poetry anthologies be placed in hotels, airports, hospitals and supermarkets.
Read the full story →Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 gave English, and other languages, a lasting term for a no-win dilemma created by absurd rules.
Read the full story →After Guillain-Barré syndrome left him paralysed in 1981, Joseph Heller recovered and co-wrote No Laughing Matter about the friends who helped him.
Read the full story →After Catch-22, Joseph Heller taught creative writing at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, and later at the City College of New York.
Read the full story →Joseph Heller's play We Bombed in New Haven, written in 1967, carried an anti-war message to Yale and then to Broadway during the Vietnam War.
Read the full story →Nearly all of Joseph Roth's novels were adapted for film or television, including Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker.
Read the full story →Joseph Roth's 1932 novel Radetzky March traced the decline of Austria-Hungary through one family and went through five printings in a few months.
Read the full story →From 1928 the Rosenwald Fund gave over $400,000 in fellowships to rising artists and scholars, most of them Black, including Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.
Read the full story →László Krasznahorkai’s novels Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, filmed by his friend Béla Tarr, carried a Hungarian vision of collapse and endurance to readers and filmgoers around the world.
Read the full story →When Leonard Bernstein won Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1990, he used the 100,000 dollar prize to start an arts-in-education project that became the Artful Learning programme.
Read the full story →Leonard Bernstein, the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, wrote and hosted 53 televised Young People's Concerts, shown in more than 40 countries.
Read the full story →Leonard Bernstein was a critical figure in the modern revival of Gustav Mahler, recording his symphonies and helping make them central to the orchestral repertoire.
Read the full story →In 1973 Leonard Bernstein gave six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question, applying ideas from linguistics to explain how music communicates.
Read the full story →On Christmas Day 1989 Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Ninth in East Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Wall, changing the word joy to freedom for an audience of about 100 million.
Read the full story →In his final summer, 1990, Leonard Bernstein founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, which has since trained more than 3,200 young musicians.
Read the full story →Leonard Bernstein's score for West Side Story, which opened on Broadway in 1957, fused jazz, Latin rhythms and symphonic technique and is still performed around the world.
Read the full story →From 1958 to 1972 Leonard Bernstein presented 53 televised Young People's Concerts, often called the most influential music education series ever produced for television.
Read the full story →First released in 1984 to little notice, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has since been recorded in more than 300 versions by artists around the world.
Read the full story →In 49 years at the St Petersburg Conservatory, Leopold Auer built a school of violin teaching that produced Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist and Nathan Milstein.
Read the full story →Arriving in New York at 73 after the Russian Revolution, Leopold Auer spent his last years teaching American students and writing down his method in books still used by violinists.
Read the full story →Babes in Arms (1937) alone gave the world 'My Funny Valentine', 'The Lady Is a Tramp', 'Where or When' and 'Johnny One-Note'.
Read the full story →Rodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse (1938), based on The Comedy of Errors, was a pioneering Shakespeare adaptation for musical comedy.
Read the full story →Rodgers and Hart's A Connecticut Yankee (1927), based on Mark Twain's novel, confirmed Hart as a leading lyricist; he revised it as his final work.
Read the full story →Lorenz Hart was among the first lyricists to use polysyllabic rhyme for wit and insight and to write in a natural, conversational voice.
Read the full story →In Hollywood in the early 1930s, Lorenz Hart wrote film songs including 'Isn't It Romantic?' for Maurice Chevalier, as well as 'Lover' and 'Blue Moon'.
Read the full story →Rodgers and Hart's 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right took the unprecedented step of satirising an American president still in office.
Read the full story →Pal Joey (1940), the first musical with unromanticised realism, won the New York Drama Critics Award when revived in 1952.
Read the full story →Lyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers wrote 28 stage musicals and more than 500 songs together, including 'Blue Moon', many now classics of the American songbook.
Read the full story →In New York, Mozart's librettist became America's first professor of Italian, staged the first full US Don Giovanni and built the country's first purpose-built opera theatre.
Read the full story →Lorenzo Da Ponte, born Emanuele Conegliano into a Jewish family, wrote the librettos for Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.
Read the full story →Besides writing some of the most widely read poems of her era, Louise Glück taught poetry for half a century and, as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, chose the first books of a new generation.
Read the full story →Marc Chagall created the America Windows for the Art Institute of Chicago as a tribute to the US Bicentennial and America's commitment to cultural and religious freedom.
Read the full story →Marc Chagall designed a stained-glass window for Chichester Cathedral at the age of 90, inspired by Psalm 150, and it was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in 1978.
Read the full story →Marc Chagall spent two years creating twelve stained-glass windows of the tribes of Israel for the synagogue of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, installed in February 1962.
Read the full story →Marc Chagall donated 17 large paintings and 38 gouaches of his Biblical Message series to France, which built a national museum for them in Nice, opened on his birthday in 1973.
Read the full story →On 23 September 1964 Marc Chagall's new ceiling for the Paris Opera was unveiled: nearly 2,400 square feet of canvas paying tribute to great composers, dancers and actors.
Read the full story →All Saints Church in Tudeley, Kent, is the only church in the world with all twelve of its windows by Marc Chagall, installed between 1967 and 1985.
Read the full story →In 1918, as commissar of arts for Vitebsk, Marc Chagall founded the city's People's Art College and an art museum, opening art education to ordinary people.
Read the full story →Through his clown Bip, his mime company and his Paris school, Marcel Marceau revived the art of mime and took it, without a single word, to audiences around the world for more than 60 years.
Read the full story →Before he was the world's most famous mime, Marcel Marceau forged papers and, dressed as a scout leader, guided Jewish children toward the Swiss border, using mime to keep them silent.
Read the full story →In Swann's Way (1913), a madeleine dipped in tea brings back a lost childhood, Proust's famous image of involuntary memory.
Read the full story →Marcel Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, some 1.25 million words long, helped pioneer stream of consciousness and shape modernism.
Read the full story →With help from his mother, Marcel Proust translated John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906) into French.
Read the full story →In the last year of her life, Curious George co-creator Margret Rey gave one million dollars each to the Boston Public Library and Beth Israel Hospital, and left the couple's whole literary archive to a public university.
Read the full story →Maurice Sendak illustrated the first five Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik and later co-created and produced the Little Bear television series (1995–2001).
Read the full story →A lifelong music lover, Maurice Sendak designed sets and costumes for operas including Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges at Glyndebourne (1982) and Hansel and Gretel (1997).
Read the full story →Maurice Sendak wrote and directed Really Rosie, a 1975 animated television musical featuring the voice of Carole King.
Read the full story →Maurice Sendak was an early member of the national board of advisors of the Children's Television Workshop as Sesame Street was being developed, and created animations for it.
Read the full story →Nadine Gordimer's novels and stories portrayed life under apartheid for readers around the world, and the South African government banned several of her books for it.
Read the full story →In 2004 Nadine Gordimer gathered about 20 of the world's leading writers to donate stories to Telling Tales, an anthology whose proceeds went to South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign.
Read the full story →In exile, Nelly Sachs learned Swedish and became a highly regarded translator of contemporary Swedish poetry into German.
Read the full story →Osip Mandelstam published his first collection, Stone, in 1913, followed by Tristia in 1922, establishing him as a leading Russian poet.
Read the full story →In the 1920s, while he had almost stopped writing poetry, Osip Mandelstam translated 19 books into Russian in six years.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”