Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Twain, Mark, pseud. of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910, American author, b. Florida, Mo. As humorist, narrator, and social observer, Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. His novel The Ad...

(Encyclopedia) Saint Mark's Church, Venice, named after the tutelary saint of Venice. The original Romanesque basilical church, built in the 9th cent. as a shrine for the saint's bones, was destroyed by fire in 967....

(Encyclopedia) Simon Peter: see Peter, Saint.

(Encyclopedia) Tobey, Mark, 1890–1976, American painter, b. Centerville, Wis. An avid traveler, Tobey visited China and Japan in 1934. He then developed his celebrated “white writing,” in which he attempted to...

(Encyclopedia) Arno, Peter ärˈnō [key], 1904–68, American cartoonist, b. New York City. Arno's satirical cartoons appeared in the New Yorker from 1925 until his death. He achieved a distinctive drawing style fe...

(Encyclopedia) Leyner, Mark, 1956–, American writer, b. Jersey City, N.J. His hyperliterate postmodernist short stories, collected in I Smell Esther Williams (1983), My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), and To...

(Encyclopedia) Peter's pence, in the Roman Catholic Church, the annual voluntary laymen's contribution to the support of the pope. Formerly Peter's pence was a yearly tax of a penny levied by the Holy See on every h...

(Encyclopedia) Vischer, Peter fĭshˈər [key], the elder, c.1455–1529, German sculptor, foremost of the bronze founders in Germany. Beginning as the assistant of his father, Hermann Vischer, Peter set up his own...

(Encyclopedia) Lombard, Peter: see Peter Lombard. ...

(Encyclopedia) Flettner, Peter: see Flötner, Peter. ...