Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Renoir, Pierre Auguste rənwärˈ [key], 1841–1919, French impressionist painter and sculptor, b. Limoges. Renoir went to work at the age of 13 in Paris as a decorator of factory-made porcelain, co...

(Encyclopedia) Louganis, Greg E. lo͞ogāˈnĭs [key], 1960–, American diver, b. San Diego, Calif. He won gold medals in springboard diving and platform diving in the 1984 Olympics and repeated in both categories ...

(Encyclopedia) Hudson River school, group of American landscape painters, working from 1825 to 1875. The 19th-century romantic movements of England, Germany, and France were introduced to the United States by such w...

(Encyclopedia) Lewis, Edward B., 1918–2004, American geneticist, b. Wilkes-Barre, Pa., grad. California Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1942). After serving as a meteorologist with the U.S. Army Air Corps during Wo...

(Encyclopedia) Buck, Linda B., 1947–, American neurobiologist, b. Seattle, Wash., Ph.D. Univ. of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 1980. Buck taught at Harvard Medi...

(Encyclopedia) Frank, Barney, 1940–, American congressman, b. Bayonne, N.J., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1962; J.D., 1977). A liberal Democrat, he began his political career as chief assistant to Boston Mayor Kevin White...

(Encyclopedia) Berlin, Irving bərlĭnˈ [key], 1888–1989, American songwriter, b. Russia as Israel Baline; his Jewish family fled a pogrom in 1893 and settled in New York's Lower East Side. Alexander's Ragtime Ba...

(Encyclopedia) Yeats, W. B. (William Butler Yeats), 1865–1939, Irish poet and playwright, b. Dublin. The greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was ...

(Encyclopedia) Bradstreet, Anne (Dudley), c.1612–1672, early American poet, b. Northampton, England, considered the first significant woman author in the American colonies. She came to Massachusetts in the Winthro...

(Encyclopedia) Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) tälˈkēn, tōlˈ– [key], 1892–1973, British novelist, b. South Africa. A fantasy writer and Oxford don, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit (1937), adapted fro...