Nobel Prize

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), pseudonym for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was born in Vicuña, Chile. The daughter of a dilettante poet, she began to write poetry as a village schoolteacher after a passionate romance with a railway employee who committed suicide. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She…

François Mauriac (1885-1970) was born in Bordeaux. His father, a banker, died when he was eighteen months old, leaving his mother with five children, of which he was the youngest. François grew up in a closely sheltered world, first under the protection of his mother, later in a school run by the Marianites. He studied…

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…

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…

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984) was born in the land of the Cossacks, now known as the Kamenskaya region of the R.S.F.S.R. He attended several high schools until 1918. During the civil war he fought on the side of the revolutionaries, and in 1922 he moved to Moscow to become a journalist. There he published a…

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father’s side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather’s extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also…

  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…

Bio-bibliographic information 1906 – Born in Dublin of Irish parents 1927 – B.A. Trinity College, Dublin 1928-29 – English reader at École Normale Supérieure, Paris 1930 – French reader at Trinity College, Dublin 1938 – Moved to France 1945 – Began writing in French 1989 – Died in Paris Samuel Beckett died…

My parents, Lewis Glashow and Bella née Rubin immigrated to New York City from Bobruisk in the early years of this century. Here they found the freedom and opportunity denied to Jews in Czarist Russia. After years of struggle, my father became a successful plumber, and his family could then enjoy the comforts of the…

I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16 my interests had focused on theoretical physics. I received my undergraduate degree from Cornell in 1954, and then went for a year…