Gerome Kamrowski Biography

Between 1938 and 1946 he lived and worked in New York City, and like a few other up-and-coming young painters was drawn to the ideas of Surrealism, a significant art trend in Europe which failed to catch on across the Atlantic. Kamrowski and his friends, among them Jackson Pollock, borrowed some of Surrealism's tenets and out of these experiments a new, equally important movement that became known as American Abstract Expressionism would emerge.

Florynce Kennedy Biography

In her cowboy hat, pants, and pink sunglasses, Kennedy gained a reputation as a flamboyant activist who stood up to authority and did not care what people said about her. Only the second African-American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School, Kennedy fought for the rights of Black Panther members and African-American singers discriminated against by music companies.

Kirk Kerkorian Biography

Kerkorian's activities made headlines because, although his personal lifestyle was far from flamboyant, he made deals in high-profile industries: movies, Las Vegas hotels, and most recently automobile manufacturing. Sometimes stereotyped as a purely financial animal who stripped industries of their profits in his quest for ever-greater wealth, Kerkorian was a generous man who by one estimate gave away some 20 percent of his enormous fortune to charity.

Ken Kesey Biography

Over time, Kesey would be seen as one of the primary trendsetters of the counter-culture movement during the 1960s; as a child and young man, however, his dreams and accomplishments were "all-American." He was born Ken Elton Kesey on September 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colorado, the son of Fred A. and Geneve (Smith) Kesey.

A. Q. Khan Biography

Khan aided North Korea's nuclear program, which apparently culminated in the test of a small weapon in October of 2006. He has shared information with Iran, but the nature and extent of the help he gave to that country's nuclear program has been unclear, and remains an issue of vital importance in ongoing debates over Iran's intentions with regard to nuclear weaponry.

Dong Kingman Biography

Kingman was born Dong Moy Shu Kingman on March 31, 1911, in Oakland, California. He was the second of eight children born to immigrants from Hong Kong.

Athanasius Kircher Biography

Kircher's erudition was vast, but it was dwarfed by his curiosity. He investigated volcanoes (by having himself lowered into one while it was erupting), hieroglyphics, infectious organisms, magnetism, the relationships between languages, astronomy, and biblical scholarship.

Klaus Von Klitzing Biography

Von Klitzing was born on June 28, 1943, in Schroda, Germany, near the Polish border. He was born to Bogislav von Klitzing and Anny Ulbrich.

Walter Kohn Biography

The early life of the theoretical physicist was as dramatic as his later scientific contributions. Kohn personally experienced major events during the bloodiest period in modern history.

Harold Walter Kroto Biography

Kroto was born on October 7, 1939, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, to Heinz and Edith Krotoschiner (his father changed the family name to Kroto in 1955). His parents were born in Berlin, Germany, and were compelled to flee to England in 1937 after the rise of the Nazi Party.

John Agyekum Kufuor Biography

John Agyekum Kufuor was born on December 8, 1938 in Kumasi, Ghana, the country's second largest city and the Asante capital. He was born the seventh of ten children to Nana Kwadwo Agyekum, head of the Oyoko royal family, and Nana Ama Dapaah, a Queen mother.

Aleksander Kwaśniewski Biography

When Kwaśniewski first won the presidency in November of 1995, he admitted that he was "irritated" by reports in the foreign media that consistently identified him as a member of what had been the only political party permitted to exist in Poland from 1948 to 1989, as he told New York Times correspondent Jane Perlez. "Not because I wasn't a member of the party.

Ricardo Lagos Biography

Lagos was born Ricardo Lagos Escobar on March 2, 1938, in Santiago, Chile, to Don Froilan Lagos, a landowner, and Emma Escobar, a piano teacher. Lagos's father died when he was only eight years old.

Hedy Lamarr Biography

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, on November 9, 1913. Her family was Jewish and well off; her father was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother a concert pianist.

Dick Lane Biography

Lane was born in 1928. His mother was a prostitute who abandoned him when he was three months old; his father was a pimp that people called Texas Slim.

Alicia De Larrocha Biography

De Larrocha has an exuberant style while playing the piano and yet has a masterful technique that is polished and mature enough to play the most difficult of pieces by a variety of classical composers. The Rocky Mountain News said of the pianist, "For seven decades, Alicia de Larrocha has stood tall as the voice of Spanish keyboard music.

Shelly Lazarus Biography

One of a handful of women to graduate from Columbia University with an MBA in the early 1970s, Lazarus propelled herself through the corporate world to become chairman and CEO of the billion dollar advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in 1997. Encouraged by legendary founder David Ogilvy, Lazarus became an evangelist for the power of brands and created an integrated multimedia advertising giant with clients worldwide.

Tanaquil LeClercq Biography

LeClercq was born on October 2, 1929, in Paris, France. Her parents were Jacques LeClerq, a French poet and writer, and Edith Whittemore, an American.

Lee Jong-Wook Biography

Lee was born on April 12, 1945, in Seoul, South Korea. He was the son of a civil servant, and his family endured great hardships during the Korean War (1950–53).

Stanislaw Lem Biography

Lem's highly philosophical novels were quite different in style and content from the largely adventure-oriented science fiction popular in the West, most of which he mercilessly disparaged; the Science Fiction Writers' Association in the United States revoked his honorary membership in a celebrated 1976 incident. His writing, often grim but leavened by dry humor, was shaped by influences specific to the time and place in which he lived.

William Arthur Lewis Biography

Entering the field of economics when blacks were normally barred from that academic profession, Lewis broke one barrier after another by dint of sheer brilliance. He was the first black professor in Britain's university system, and later the first one at Princeton University in the United States.

Alan Lomax Biography

If ever a man was born into the field of folklore and musicology, it was Lomax. Born January 31, 1915, in Austin, Texas, he was the son of John Avery Lomax, a onetime banker who became the preeminent collector of cowboy songs and Southwestern American folklore.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Biography

Lula came to the presidency from a labor union background, and he won the presidency partly through populist appeals. Yet the first part of his presidency was not marked by the turn to the political left undertaken by his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chávez.

Peter Maas Biography

Maas emerged as one of the writing "stars" of the so-called New Journalism style of reporting that came into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Typically, the proponents cut their professional teeth in the newspaper industry and later graduated into magazine writing, producing articles for magazines such as Esquire, Life, and Look.

Elizabeth Maconchy Biography

Maconchy, known by the nickname of Betty, was born in the town of Broxbourne in eastern England's Hertfordshire region on March 19, 1907. Her father was an Irish-born lawyer.

Mako Biography

"In 1965," noted David Henry Hwang in the Los Angeles Times, "there were no Asians in America. At least according to Hollywood, there were only Orientals, Japanese and Korean enemies, mysterious foreigners crammed into exotic Chinatowns, geisha girls beguiling American servicemen abroad, Charlie Chans, Fu Manchus, and the cook on 'Bonanza.'… Yet in 1965, a young actor named Mako believed Asians did exist in this country, and he spent his life proving it." As a result of Mako's efforts, audiences flocked to plays by Hwang himself, such as M.

Alice Marriott Biography

"Almost from the start, my parents—especially my father—launched the process of figuring out how to do something right and then writing it down," Marriott's son J. W.

Marianne Martinez Biography

Amember of the Viennese court aristocracy who never held a formal post as composer, Martinez and her music fell out of favor as the new concept of the composer as independent genius came into vogue. Musical accounts written in her own time testify to her high level of activity and to the quality of her compositions, but after her death she was almost completely forgotten.

Deepa Mehta Biography

Exploring the experiences of women in her native India has placed Mehta in the midst of intense controversy. She has been burned in effigy, seen the stars of her films threatened with violence, and struggled to see her films completed and shown.

Georges Méliès Biography

Beginning with the mere raw materials of a new medium, which had done little more than record scenes of everyday life, Méliès began to use film to tell stories, and then, drawing on his background as a stage musician, to enchant. Largely by accident he began exploring the uses of stop-action photography.