Nobel Prize

Henri Bergson (1859-1941), the son of a Jewish musician and an English woman, was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy. After a teaching career as a schoolmaster in various secondary schools, Bergson was appointed to the École Normale Supérieure in 1898 and, from 1900 to 1921, held…

  1905 Born on 25 July in Ruse, Bulgaria. Mother tongue Ladino(archaic dialect of Spanish). 1911 Moved to Manchester, England. First school. Earliest lessonsin English. 1912 Sudden death of his father. War breaks out in the Balkans. 1913 His mother moves to Vienna with her three small sons. German lessons from his mother. Elementary school…

I was born December 21, 1917 in Cologne, on the Rhine, the son of the sculptor and cabinet-maker, Viktor Böll, and his wife, Maria, née Hermanns. Between 1924 and 1928 I attended elementary school in Köln Raderthal, and from 1928 to 1937, the state-run Kaiser-Wilhelm classical secondary school in Cologne. In spring 1937 I began…

I was born on May 28th 1912 in Knightsbridge, London, to Australian parents. Victor White was then forty-two, his wife, Ruth Withycombe, ten years younger. When I was six months old my parents returned to Australia and settled in Sydney, principally because my mother could not face the prospect of too many sisters-in-law on the…

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) was educated at Harrow and studied law at New College, Oxford. He travelled widely and at the age of twenty-eight began to write, at first for his own amusement. His first stories were published under the pseudonym John Sinjohn and later were withdrawn. He considered The Island Pharisees (1904) his first important…

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), the most outstanding and prolific Polish writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, was born in Wola Okrzejska, in the Russian part of Poland. His father’s family was actively engaged in the revolutionary struggles for Polish independence, which accounts for the strong patriotic element in Sienkiewicz’ work. Historical scholarship on…

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960), born in Moscow, was the son of talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy’s works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Pasternak’s education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer Scriabin, Pasternak took up…

Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907) was born in Val di Castello, a small town near Pisa. He was early attracted to the Greek and Roman authors; in addition, he conscientiously studied the Italian classics: Dante, Tasso, and Alfieri. At the age of twenty he graduated with a degree in philosophy and letters from the University of Pisa.…

Saint-John Perse, born in 1887, pseudonym for Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, came from an old Bourguignon family which settled in the French Antilles in the seventeenth century and returned to France at the end of the nineteenth century. Perse studied law at Bordeaux and, after private studies in political science, went into the diplomatic service in…

I was born on May 7th, 1867, in the village of Kobielo Wielkie in that part of Poland which was under Russian rule. My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother’s brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but…