Music, film, literature, painting, theater, the cultural works that define modern artistic life.
Two sons of Jewish immigrants, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, created Superman, who debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and launched the superhero genre.
Read the full story →Aaron Copland co-founded the Copland-Sessions Concerts and in 1937 helped form the American Composers Alliance, serving as its president from 1939 to 1945.
Read the full story →Aaron Copland's 1938 ballet Billy the Kid, using six cowboy folk songs, was among the first to display a truly American music and dance vocabulary.
Read the full story →During the Second World War Aaron Copland wrote Fanfare for the Common Man and Lincoln Portrait, which both became American patriotic standards.
Read the full story →Aaron Copland left much of his large estate to create the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers, which gives more than 600,000 dollars a year to performing groups.
Read the full story →Aaron Copland met and helped hundreds of young composers, teaching for many summers at Tanglewood and earning the title Dean of American Music.
Read the full story →From about 1935 Aaron Copland composed music for young performers and audiences, including the piano pieces The Young Pioneers and the children's opera The Second Hurricane.
Read the full story →Aaron Copland's lectures at New York's New School became What to Listen for in Music, a guide for ordinary listeners first published in 1939 and reprinted many times.
Read the full story →Amedeo Modigliani, from a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, created portraits and nudes with elongated faces and necks that became some of the most admired images in modern art.
Read the full story →Around 1911 Amedeo Modigliani's drawings combined his passion for ancient Egyptian art with the lessons of Cubism, forging the style later seen in his famous portraits.
Read the full story →Amedeo Modigliani's portraits of his friends, including Chaïm Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and Jean Cocteau, form a gallery of the School of Paris.
Read the full story →Over five decades Amos Oz published about 40 books of fiction, essays and children's stories, translated into some 45 languages.
Read the full story →In 2007 a passage from the Chinese translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness became the first modern Hebrew literature to appear in an official Chinese textbook.
Read the full story →Amos Oz's 1968 novel My Michael, about a young Jerusalem wife's inner life, was a bestseller that helped launch the Israeli literary New Wave.
Read the full story →Amos Oz's 2002 memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness was named in 2007 one of the ten most important books since Israel's founding, and became a film in 2015.
Read the full story →After hearing a 1944 radio appeal to preserve wartime diaries, Anne Frank, aged 14, began rewriting her diary as a book, creating pseudonyms and shaping it for readers.
Read the full story →Arnold Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) in 1910, a teaching book that musicians still study more than a century later.
Read the full story →In 1923 Arnold Schoenberg announced his method of composing with twelve tones, a new way of organising music that shaped composition for half a century.
Read the full story →Schoenberg's 1912 Pierrot lunaire, 21 poems for a half-sung reciter and five players, created the 'Pierrot ensemble' that composers still write for today.
Read the full story →In 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded Vienna's Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave 353 carefully rehearsed performances of new music for its members.
Read the full story →After fleeing Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg taught in Los Angeles, becoming a UCLA professor in 1936; his students included John Cage and Lou Harrison.
Read the full story →Arnold Schoenberg's Vienna pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern became major composers in their own right, forming with him the Second Viennese School.
Read the full story →Arnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 when he was 25, remains one of the most performed works of its era.
Read the full story →Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), set during the Salem witch trials, became his most frequently produced work around the world.
Read the full story →In 1983 Arthur Miller travelled to China to direct Death of a Salesman with Chinese actors at the Beijing People's Art Theatre.
Read the full story →The University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2007, and the Arthur Miller Foundation supports theatre education in New York City public schools.
Read the full story →In the mid-1930s, at the height of his fame, Benny Goodman performed in public with Black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, breaching the colour line in American popular music.
Read the full story →Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert helped jazz win respect as serious listening music, and his commissions gave the world new classical works for the clarinet by Bartók and Copland.
Read the full story →Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), co-written with Raymond Chandler, became one of the defining films of film noir.
Read the full story →Billy Wilder's 1945 film The Lost Weekend, a stark portrait of an alcoholic writer, won the Oscar for Best Picture and the top prize at the first Cannes festival.
Read the full story →In 1930 a young Billy Wilder co-wrote People on Sunday, a low-budget film about ordinary Berliners on a day off that became a landmark of realist cinema.
Read the full story →Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind, released in 1963, asked whether war and injustice would ever end, and with The Times They Are a-Changin' became an anthem of the civil rights movement.
Read the full story →Rejected at home, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy in 1957, and its English edition spent 26 weeks at the top of the New York Times list.
Read the full story →Boris Pasternak wrote My Sister, Life in the revolutionary summer of 1917; published in 1922, it changed the course of Russian poetry.
Read the full story →Boris Pasternak's translations ranged from Goethe's Faust and Schiller to the poets of Georgia, bringing world literature to Russian readers.
Read the full story →Barred from publishing much of his own work under Stalin, Boris Pasternak translated Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays into Russian versions still widely performed.
Read the full story →Once banned in the Soviet Union, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003.
Read the full story →When Camille Pissarro returned from England after the Franco-Prussian War, only about 40 of the 1,500 paintings he had left behind survived. He started again.
Read the full story →Unable to paint outdoors because of an eye infection, Camille Pissarro painted from hotel windows, creating his celebrated 1897 views of the Boulevard Montmartre.
Read the full story →In 1873 Camille Pissarro helped create the artists' cooperative whose 1874 show launched Impressionism, and he drafted the group's first charter.
Read the full story →Camille Pissarro's letters to his son Lucien, published in English in 1943, remain a key source on how the Impressionists thought and worked.
Read the full story →As a refugee in London in 1870–71, Camille Pissarro painted the city's suburbs, studied Constable and Turner with Monet, and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.
Read the full story →Camille Pissarro experimented with etching, lithography, woodcut and monotype, becoming one of the most dedicated printmakers among the Impressionists.
Read the full story →In 1999 Carl Djerassi and the Nobel chemist Roald Hoffmann co-wrote Oxygen, a play about the discovery of oxygen and about what it means to be a scientist.
Read the full story →Carl Djerassi assembled one of the most significant private collections of Paul Klee's art and arranged for it to go to the Albertina in Vienna and SFMOMA in San Francisco.
Read the full story →After his daughter Pamela, an artist, died in 1978, Carl Djerassi turned his California cattle ranch into the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, a retreat for working artists.
Read the full story →Starting with Cantor's Dilemma in 1989, Carl Djerassi wrote novels in a genre he called science-in-fiction, showing readers how real scientists think, compete and behave.
Read the full story →For his 1985 novel Contact, Carl Sagan asked his friend Kip Thorne how a wormhole might work. The book sold 1.7 million copies in two years and became a 1997 film.
Read the full story →Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, first broadcast in 1980, has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries, and its companion book was the best-selling science book of its time.
Read the full story →Carl Sagan's 1977 book The Dragons of Eden, on the evolution of human intelligence, won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and introduced his Cosmic Calendar.
Read the full story →On 26 May 1973 Carole King gave a free concert in New York's Central Park, drawing an audience of at least 100,000 people.
Read the full story →In 1975 Carole King wrote and sang the music for Really Rosie, an animated television special with lyrics by Maurice Sendak, still loved by children and parents.
Read the full story →Carole King's early songs were recorded by artists from the Drifters, who sang Up on the Roof, to the Beatles, who recorded Chains on their first album.
Read the full story →Carole King co-wrote her first US No. 1 before she was 20, then released Tapestry in 1971, which held No. 1 for 15 weeks, sold more than 25 million copies and won four Grammys.
Read the full story →David Grossman's Falling Out of Time, a work of prose and verse about parents mourning their children, has been adapted for the stage many times.
Read the full story →David Grossman's 1986 novel See Under: Love, about a boy raised among silent Holocaust survivors, became a landmark of Israeli literature about the Shoah.
Read the full story →David Grossman's 2000 novel Someone to Run With, about a teenage boy and a runaway girl on the streets of Jerusalem, won Israel's Sapir Prize.
Read the full story →David Grossman's 2008 novel To the End of the Land, about a mother walking the Galilee to escape news of her soldier son, won the National Jewish Book Award and the JQ Wingate Prize.
Read the full story →The daughter of a Czech-Jewish chemist whose relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, Elfriede Jelinek spent decades using novels and plays to break Austria’s silence about its role in the Nazi era and about violence against women.
Read the full story →Elias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”