Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) prospecting, search for mineral deposits suitable for mining. Modern prospecting has replaced earlier methods based on chance or superstition (e.g., use of the divining rod) with others based on a sci...

(Encyclopedia) Wilson, August, 1945–2005, American playwright and poet, b. Pittsburgh as Frederick August Kittel, Jr. Largely self-educated, Wilson first attracted wide critical attention with his Broadway debut, ...

(Encyclopedia) Stubbs, George, 1724–1806, English painter known for his studies of horses. Self-taught, Stubbs was interested in comparative anatomy and published his Anatomy of the Horse (1766), which is still ad...

(Encyclopedia) Bazille, Frédéric, 1841–70, early French impressionist painter. He abandoned medical school to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he met and became friends with Monet, Renoir, and oth...

(Encyclopedia) Mailer, Norman (Norman Kingsley Mailer), 1923–2007, American writer, b. Long Branch, N.J., grad. Harvard, 1943. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., served in the army during World War II, and at the age o...

(Encyclopedia) Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Oak Park, Ill. one of the great American writers of the 20th cent. Hemingway's fiction usually focuses on people living ...

(Encyclopedia) Bacon, Francis, 1910–92, English painter, b. Dublin. A self-taught artist, Bacon rejected abstraction in painting to explore a repertoire of strange, fractured, and often bizarre figurative images, ...

(Encyclopedia) Brooklyn Bridge, vehicular suspension bridge, New York City, southernmost of the bridges across the East River, between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn; built 1869–83. The achievement of J. A. Roebling...

(Encyclopedia) Peirce, Charles Sanders pûrs [key], 1839–1914, American philosopher and polymath, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard, 1859; son of Benjamin Peirce. Except for occasional lectures he renounced the r...

(Encyclopedia) Miller, Arthur, 1915–2005, American dramatist, b. New York City, grad. Univ. of Michigan, 1938. One of America's most distinguished playwrights, he has been hailed as the finest realist of the 20th-...