By: Brian Berger

Forget the breasts, the wigs, and, recently, the plastic surgery. Consider instead DOLLY PARTON (born 1946), the fourth of twelve children from a farming family in Locust Ridge, Tenn., as she arrives in Nashville, 1964. […]

By: Katie Hennessey

A high school dropout who learned his trade on the Borscht Belt summer circuit, DANNY KAYE’s (1913-87) first taste of Broadway fame came with the 1941 Gershwin-Weill tongue-twister “Tchaikovsky (and other Russians),” in which he […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Recalling SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) as “a leading public intellectual” — a category she did not invent, but perhaps perfected — is no substitute for rereading the early, electrifying essays collected in Against Interpretation and Styles […]

By: Matthew De Abaitua

Few cultural scraps are as redolent of lo-fi VHS genre pleasures than a movie trailer with JOHN CARPENTER’s (born 1948) name above the title and his own analog synth score. Carpenter’s breakthrough was Dark Star […]

By: Lucy Sante

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (Don Van Vliet, born 1941) is — like Thelonious Monk or Alfred Jarry — an artist who describes a world a few clicks away from the one that pedestrian sorts like you or […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The most enduring recording of SLICK RICK (Richard Walters, aka MC Ricky D and Rick the Ruler, born 1965) is probably his guest appearance on Doug E. Fresh’s “La Di Da Di” in 1985. But […]

By: Tim Carmody

He defamiliarized science rather than taming it.

By: Mark Kingwell

By: Matthew Battles

Wisconsin’s Sand County lacks the grandeur of the Sierras that inspired John Muir. Its modest landscapes of meadows, streams, and oak savannas do not exhibit the sublime extremes of the ocean that furnished Rachel Carson […]

By: Brian Berger

He challenged social and musical conventions.

By: Joshua Glenn

He gave us the term “robot,” as part of his critique of capitalism.

By: Lynn Peril

Dubbed the “Striptease Intellectual” by the American Mercury, GYPSY ROSE LEE (1911-70) wowed the boys with her witty chatter as she removed all but her G-string and two strategically placed bows. An autodidact who penned […]

By: Sarah Weinman

NICHOLSON BAKER (born 1957) was not the first novelist to create an entire narrative out of the smallest of events, but his 1988 debut, The Mezzanine, still strikes a melodic chord in readers because of […]

By: Patrick Cates

Editor’s note: This is one of the most popular posts, traffic-wise, ever published on HiLobrow. Click here to see a list of the Top 25 Most Popular posts (as of October 2012); and click here […]

By: Jason Grote

No one personified the knotty relationship between comedy and brutality quite like MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE (1940–94), the man responsible for the funniest (and most unnerving) comic bits from the golden ages of both Saturday Night Live […]