L’Engle, Madeleine
(b. 1918) American writer. L’Engle has written nonfiction and fiction for adults but is best known for her children’s literature. Two of her many children’s titles are
A Wrinkle in Time
(1962) and
A Ring of Endless Light
(1980). She has won many awards, including the Newbery Medal.
Liszt, Franz
(1811–1886) Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso. Celebrated as a pianist, Liszt toured Europe playing piano while he composed. Some of his works include
Fantasia on Hungarian Folk Tunes
(1853),
Lespreludes
(1854), and
A Symphony to Dante’s Divina Commedia
(1857). A tall and dashing figure, Liszt was the much sought after idol of countesses, actresses, and princesses; his reputation for sexual liaisons is legendary. Christopher Porterfield commented on this, writing in
Smithsonian
that Liszt “was a notorious lover and bon vivant [whose] escapades have tended to obscure his genius.”
Logue, Christopher
(b. 1926) English poet. Logue adapted Homer’s
Iliad
in four separate books:
Patrocleia
(1962),
Pax
(1967),
Kings
(1991), and
War Music
(1997). He has also adapted and retold children’s stories in
The Crocodile
(1976) and
Puss in Boots
(1977).
Lomax, Alan
(b. 1915) American folklorist. John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax’s father, was a pioneer in the field of folklore and served as a curator for the Library of Congress. His son has continued the work of preserving folk culture, recording music in England, Scotland, Ireland, the Caribbean, Spain, Italy, and around the United States. He has also written several books on the subject of American folk music.
Lubitsch, Ernst
(1892–1947) American film director. As a director of comedy, Lubitsch has been compared and ranked with his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His best-known works are probably
Ninotchka
(1939) and
To Be or Not to Be
(1942). He died during the production of
That Lady in Ermine
(1948).
Lurie, Alison
(b. 1926) American writer. Lurie is best known for her novels
The War between the Tates
(1974) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
Foreign Affairs
(1984).
MacLeish, Archibald
(1892–1982) American writer, poet, dramatist, statesman, and professor. MacLeish won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1933 for
Conquistador
and again in 1953 for
Collected Poems: 1917-1952.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959 for
J.B.
He served as Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944 and as assistant secretary of state from 1944 to 1945. From 1949 until he retired in 1962, he was a professor at Harvard.
Magnani, Anna
(1909–1973) Italian actress. Magnani is best known in the United States for her Academy Award-winning performance in the 1955 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play
The Rose Tattoo.
Mann, Thomas
(1875–1955) German novelist. The author of
Death in Venice
and
The Magic Mountain,
Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Masefield, John
(1878–1967) English writer. Although Masefield wrote short stories, novels, and dramatic literature, he was best known as a poet. He was Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.
Masina, Giulietta
(1921–1994) Italian actress; wife of Federico Fellini. Masina’s work in Fellini’s
La Strada
(1954),
Nights of Cabiria
(1956), and
Juliet of the Spirits
(1965) gained her international critical acclaim. She made many more films with her husband and other important directors and won many international film awards, including best actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957 for her performance in
Nights of Cabiria.
Her last film,
Ginger and Fred
(1986), was directed by Fellini and costarred Marcello Mastroianni.
Mastroianni, Marcello
(1924–1996) Italian actor. Mastroianni, who was described as a modest man, was nevertheless one of Italy’s premier leading men, and he appeared in over 120 films. He won many international film awards celebrating his performances. He earned Academy Award nominations for
Divorce—Italian Style
(1962),
A Special Day
(1977), and
Dark Eyes
(1987). Mastroianni, who was Fellini’s favorite actor, appeared in several of that director’s films, including
La Dolce Vita
(1960),
8½
(1963),
Roma
(1971), and
Ginger and Fred
(1986).
Matthiessen, Peter
(b. 1927) American writer; co-founder and editor of the
Paris Review.
Matthiessen has written several novels, including
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
(1965), which was adapted for film in the 1992 motion picture of the same name. In addition to novels, he has published several nonfiction works, including
The Snow Leopard
(1978), an autobiographical narrative of a journey he took to Nepal.
McCrindle, Joseph
(b. 1923) American editor and writer. McCrindle has served as editor for the
Transatlantic Review
since 1959. He is currently editing a collection of poetry published in that same journal.
McCullers, Carson
(1917–1967) Southern novelist from Columbus, Georgia. Many of her characters have been called “grotesques.” Some of McCullers’s novels are
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
(1940),
The Ballad of the Sad Café
(1943), and
The Member of the Wedding
(1946). In 1937 Carson married Reeves McCullers, and in 1940 they were divorced. They remarried in 1945. In 1947 Carson suffered a series of strokes that left her depressed, and she tried to kill herself in 1948. Her husband became increasingly suicidal himself, despairing over his lack of direction and their tumultuous marriage. Reeves eventually killed himself in 1953 in a Paris hotel. The rest of Carson’s life was difficult; she lost her mother in 1955, underwent surgery for breast cancer in 1961, and died soon after of another stroke when she was fifty.
McKinley, Hazel
(b. 1916) American artist. McKinley is Peggy Guggenheim’s sister.
Miller, Henry
(1891–1980) American writer. Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
(1934) and
Tropic of Capricorn
(1939), autobiographical novels written while he was part of the Paris literary scene, were initially banned in the United States because of their raw treatment of sexuality. Miller wrote several other novels, including those in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy:
Sexus
(1949),
Plexus
(1953), and
Nexus
(1959).
Milo, Sandra
(b. 1935) Italian actress. Milo appeared in Fellini’s
8½
(1963) and
Juliet of the Spirits
(1965).
Miro, Joan
(1893–1983) Spanish painter in the surrealist style. Miro is considered one of the most important and influential painters of the twentieth century.
Mitchell, Arthur
(b. 1934) African American ballet dancer and choreographer. Born and raised in Harlem, Mitchell was one of the first black classical ballet dancers to succeed professionally. He was a premier danseur in New York City Ballet from 1955 to 1972. He founded the Dance Theater of Harlem in 1969.
Morante, Elsa
(1918–1985) Italian novelist. Morante published her first novel,
Menzogne e sortilegio,
in Italy in 1948. It was abridged and translated into English in 1951 as
House of Liars.
Her novel
L’lsola
(1957) was published in 1959 by Knopf in the English translation,
Arturo’s Island.
She married Alberto Moravia in 1941. They divorced in 1963.
Moravia, Alberto
(1907–1990) Italian novelist. Moravia was one of the best-known writers in Italy and is credited with ushering the Italian novel into modernity by writing in the Italian spoken by the people, rescuing Italian prose from what came to be seen as the artificial prose of the nineteenth-century novel. Poor translations of his work have kept him from being better known outside of Italy.
Moss, Howard
(1922–1987) American man of letters; editor, poet, and literary critic. As the poetry editor of
The New Yorker
for almost forty years, Moss took the opportunity to help important poets get established while they were young: James Dickey, Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton, James Scully, Theodore Roethke, L. E. Sissman, Richard Wilbur, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Strand. Moss has published substantial amounts of his own poetry and literary criticism, such as the highly esteemed
The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust
(1962). In 1972 Moss won the National Book Award for Poetry for
Selected Poems
(1971).
Nabokov, Nicolas
(b. 1903) Russian-born composer. His compositions include
Sinfonia Biblica
(1941) for the New York Philharmonic,
SymboliChorestiani
(1956) for the Venice Music Festival, and
A Prayer
(1968) for the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein.
Nin, Anaïs
(1903–1977) American journal writer and novelist. Although Nin wrote novels, short stories, and erotica, her journals stand as her most acclaimed literary achievement. These journals are collected in the seven-volume
The Diary of Anaïs Nin,
which spans the years 1931 to 1974.
The Diary
has not met with universal approbation. Susan Heath, for example, in
Saturday Review,
described Nin’s journal as “the tiresome work of a querulous bore who cultivates neurosis in hopes of achieving self-realization.” One could argue that Nin’s many affairs, including a brief incestuous one with her father, may have been part of such cultivation of neurosis.
North, Alex
(1910–1991) American film composer. Among the many films for which North composed the score are
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951),
The Rose Tattoo
,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1966), and
Prizzi’s Honor
(1985). North was nominated fifteen times for an Oscar for his scores. In 1986 he was the first composer ever to receive an honorary Academy Award for “his brilliant artistry in the creation of memorable music for a host of distinguished motion pictures.”
O’Brien, Edna
(b. 1931) Irish writer. O’Brien has written fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic literature. Her works include
The Country Girls
(novel, 1960);
Tales for the Telling
(for children, 1986);
A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers
(play produced in London, 1962); and several plays for television.
O’Neil, Nance
(1874–1965) American stage actress. O’Neil, whose real name was Gertrude Lamson, was an admired leading lady whose famous roles included Leah in Augustin Daly’s
Leah the Forsaken
and Juliet in
Romeo and Juliet.
She was a major touring star of the turn-of-the-century stage. Her career, like that of many stage actors, languished when motion pictures began to dominate popular entertainment. She did continue to perform, however, into her sixties.
O’Neill, James
(1849–1920) Irish-born American stage actor. Despite playing many roles early in his career, O’Neill became typecast as Edmond Dantes in a traveling stage version of
The Count of Monte Cristo,
in which he first appeared in 1882. He played the part over six thousand times. He was also the father of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill, author of
Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Ozick, Cynthia
(b. 1928) American writer. Author of the novel
Trust
(1966), she has been a frequent contributor of essays, poetry, reviews, and translations to such periodicals as the
New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Ms., Esquire, The New Yorker,
the
American Poetry Review, Harper’s,
and
The New York Times Magazine.
Pfriem, Bernard
(b. 1914) American painter. In addition to presenting exhibitions of his work, Pfriem taught in the MOMA Educational Program.
Pitter, Ruth
(1897–1992) English writer. Among her titles of poetry collections, the best known is
A Mad Lady’s Garland,
published in 1934 with a foreword by the Poet Laureate John Masefield.
The Rude Potato,
which Eugene mentions, was published in 1941.