Until he was nearly 50, CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920-94), drinker, womanizer, brawler and writer, cranked out short stories and poetry only in his spare time....

Child of St. Petersburg, bug-maker for the KGB, and husband of the African-American dancer Lavinia Williams, LÉON THEREMIN (1896-1993) achieved immortality through the eponymous...

Unlike Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Foucault, exact contemporaries of his who were merely inspired by pop culture, the French-born comics writer RENÉ GOSCINNY (1926-77) cranked...

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980) was schooled in the genre conventions of the English Murder Mystery and the Hollywood Thriller, and his primary goal was always...

The 1864-73 cohort is a lost generation of absurdists and experimenters.

Over his fecund scientific career, ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER (1887-1961) placed quantum wave mechanics on a firm mathematical basis, contributed to the theory of color measurement...

When most people hear “Steve” and “Apple” mentioned in the same sentence, they think of Steve Jobs, ringmaster of technology fetishists, evangelizing about the...

Reminiscing about my early days in the used-paper trade, I find that I can become tender if not actually moist-eyed at the thought of...