Nobel Prize

Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) was born in Aurich, Germany. He studied philosophy, philology, and history at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin and wrote his dissertation on the language of Aristotle. He became a professor of philosophy at Basle in 1871 and from 1874 on held the chair of philosophy at Jena. Eucken was an idealist…

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born on the 16th of September, 1888, at Ylä-Satakunta in the Hämeenkyrö Parish of Finland on a desolate croft of the same name. The cottage had been built by his parents, his father Frans Henrik Henriksson, who had moved there some ten years before from Kauvatsa in the Kumo Valley, and…

I was born in the little town of Nuoro in Sardinia in 1871. My father was a fairly well-to-do landowner who farmed his own land. He was also a hospitable man and had friends in all of the towns surrounding Nuoro. When these friends and their families had to come to Nuoro on business or…

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…

  Romain Rolland did not submit an autobiography.

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…

I come from an old and noble house that has given to Russia a good many illustrious persons in politics as well as in the arts, among whom two poets of the early nineteenth century stand out in particular: Anna Búnina and Vasíly Zhukóvsky, one of the great names in Russian literature, the son of…

I was born in Neuenkirchen, North-Rhine Westphalia, in the Federal Republic of Germany on May 16, 1950, as the fourth child of Anton and Elisabeth Bednorz. My parents, originating from Silesia, had lost sight of each other during the turbulences of World War II, when my sister and two brothers had to leave home and…

Wilhelm Wien was born on January 13, 1864 at Fischhausen, in East Prussia. He was the son of the landowner Carl Wien, and seemed destined for the life of a gentleman farmer, but an economic crisis and his own secret sense of vocation led him to University studies. When in 1866 his parents moved to…

I was born in Basel, Switzerland, on 20th April 1927. The first years of my life were spent with my parents in Salzburg, Austria, where my father was studying music. Hereafter, my mother and I moved to Dornach near Basle to the home of my grandparents, and from there to Lugano in the italian-speaking part…