Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da äˌmārēˈjē [key], 1571–1610, Italian painter. His surname, Caravaggio, came from his birthplace. After an apprenticeship in Milan, he arrived (1592) in Rome w...

(Encyclopedia) Bellow, Saul, 1915–2005, American novelist, b. Lachine, Que., as Solomon Bellow, grad. Northwestern Univ., 1937. Born of Russian-Jewish parents, he grew up in the slums of Montreal and Chicago, and ...

(Encyclopedia) Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David Salinger) sălˈĭnjər [key], 1919–2010, American novelist and short-story writer, b. New York City. His considerable literary stature rests on a small but extremely i...

(Encyclopedia) Goering or Göring, Hermann Wilhelm both: hĕrˈmän vĭlˈhĕlm göˈrĭng [key], 1893–1946, German National Socialist leader. In World War I he was a hero of the German air force. An early member ...

(Encyclopedia) Adams, Henry, 1838–1918, American writer and historian, b. Boston; son of Charles Francis Adams (1807–86). He was secretary (1861–68) to his father, then U.S. minister to Great Britain. Upon his...

(Encyclopedia) coast protection, methods used to protect coastal lands from erosion. Beaches can exist only where a delicate dynamic equilibrium exists between the amount of sand supplied to the beach and the inevit...

(Encyclopedia) Stern, Robert A. M. (Robert Arthur Morton Stern), 1939–, American architect, b. New York City. He studied architecture at Yale Univ., became a practicing architect in the mid-1960s, and a professor ...

(Encyclopedia) Verga, Giovanni jōvänˈnē vĕrˈgä [key], 1840–1922, Italian novelist, b. Sicily. He abandoned the study of law for literature and wrote several novels of passion in the style of the French real...

(Encyclopedia) Paine, Thomas, 1737–1809, Anglo-American political theorist and writer, b. Thetford, Norfolk, England. The son of a working-class Quaker, he became an excise officer and was dismissed from the servi...

(Encyclopedia) Heaney, Seamus (Seamus Justin Heaney) shāˈməs, hēˈnē [key], 1939–2013, Irish poet, one of the finest contemporary English poets, b. Londonderry (now Derry), Northern Ireland, grad. Queen's Uni...