Dr. Seuss was an American children’s writer, illustrator, editor, and publisher.
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on March 2, 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was born into a family of a brewer. All his grandparents were immigrants from Germany. His father was the director of a local zoo and the director of the National Park. In his childhood Theodor liked to draw inhabitants of the zoo.
Dr. Seuss graduated from Dartmouth College and went to study at Oxford, which he did not finish. After studying more than a year, he left Oxford and went on a journey throughout Europe. When he returned to America he became a political cartoonist and advertising artist. In Oxford Geisel met his future wife – Helen, who was his co-author and a true friend. They got married in 1927.
On October 23, 1967 due to suffering from a long struggle with the diseases, including cancer, and emotional pain of her husband’s affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, Helen Palmer Geisel committed suicide.
Geisel married Dimond on June 21, 1968.
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Maurice Sendak was an American children’s author and illustrator. A picture book Where the Wild Things Are (1963) brought him worldwide fame. More than 80 children’s books were written or illustrated by Sendak.
Maurice Bernard Sendak was born on June 10, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. He was born into a Jewish family. His parents, Philip (Pinhos) Sendak and Sarah Schindler, emigrated from Poland and Russia (respectively) in 1913 and settled in Brooklyn. He was the youngest son in the family. Along with his sister Natalie, and brother, Jack, he grew up in a poor section of Brooklyn. As a child Maurice drew pictures and wrote stories. At the age of twelve while watching cartoon Fantasia Maurice decided to become an illustrator. After high school he trained at an art school in New York City.
The first collection of stories was released in 1951, and in 1963 he published his most popular book, Where the Wild Things Are, which was republished in dozens of countries.
He illustrated a series of books for children Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik.
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Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He was one of the most famous thinkers and misanthrope. He was fond of mysticism, highly appreciated the main works of Immanuel Kant, calling them “the most important phenomenon in philosophy for two thousand years”, appreciated the philosophical ideas of Buddhism, Epictetus, Cicero and others. He criticized his contemporaries Hegel and Fichte. He called the existing world “the worst of all possible worlds”, for which he earned the nickname “the philosopher of pessimism”. His main philosophical work is The World as Will and Idea (1818). His work influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Leo Tolstoy, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788 in Danzig. When Schopenhauer was 5, Danzig, formerly a free mercantile city, was annexed by Poland. As a consequence, his family moved to Hamburg, Germany.
Schopenhauer studied mostly the sciences and medicine but eventually turned to philosophy.
His passion for philosophy led him to the University of Berlin.
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Lewis Carroll was English author, mathematician, logician, philosopher, deacon and photographer. His most famous works are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, as well as a humorous poem The Hunting of the Snark. He was Oxford University Professor of Mathematics (1855-1881).
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (his real name) was born on January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, England. He had nine sisters and two brothers and frequently made up games and wrote stories and poems. As a boy he loved mathematical puzzles. Later he wrote books on mathematics and logic.
Carroll never married, but he loved entertaining children. He was especially fond of the daughters of the dean of his college. Carroll often took the girls—Alice, Lorina, and Edith Liddell—on boating and picnic trips and amused them by making up stories and drawing pictures. Alice was the middle, aged 10 at the time when Carroll started working on his book; her sisters were aged 13 and 8.
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Charles Schulz was an American cartoonist, author of Peanuts comic strip about a boy, Charlie Brown, and his dog Snoopy, on which he worked for fifty years. His nickname was Sparky. The series has received international recognition and is considered one of the most successful comic books of all time. Schultz was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. Schulz was the winner of two Reuben awards from the National Cartoonists Society, two Peabody, and five Emmy awards and a member of the Cartoonist Hall of Fame.
Charles Monroe Schulz was born on November 26, 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His uncle called him Sparky after the horse from Barney Google. As a child and teenager, Charles was very shy. He loved to draw as a child. His first published cartoon was a drawing of his small black-and-white dog, Spike. This drawing appeared in a newspaper in 1937.
After his mother’s death in 1943 he was enlisted in the US Army and went to Europe during World War II. After the war, Schultz returned to Minneapolis, where he began working as an art teacher.
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Jules Verne was a French geographer and writer, a classic of adventure literature. He is known as one of the first science fiction writers. He was a member of the French Geographical Society. Although his work had both geographical and scientific flaws, Verne’s book was ahead of its time.
Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828 in Nantes, France. He was the first of five children. As a young boy Verne often went sailing with his brother on the Loire River in France.
On January 10, 1857 Jules married Honorine de Viane (nee Morel), a widow with two children from her first marriage. Four years later, on 3 August 1861, Honorine gave birth to his son Michel, their only child. The son of the writer filmed several works of his father: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1916), La Destinée de Jean Morénas (1916), Black India (1917), Southern Star (1918), The Begum’s Fortune (1919). His grandson, Jean-Jules Verne (1892-1980), was an author of a monograph on the life and work of his grandfather. He worked on it for 40 years. The great-grandson – Jean Verne is a famous opera tenor. It was he who found the manuscript of the novel Paris in the XX century, which for many years was considered a family myth.
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Patrick Henry Pearse was an Irish poet, educator, lawyer and revolutionary nationalist. He was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. From his youth he was an active participant of Celtic Revival, wrote poems in Gaelic. In 1908, he became the founder of St. Enda’s College. In 1913 he became a participant and one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers and later joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). In 1916 Patrick actively participated in the preparation of the uprising against British rule. He is one of the authors of the Proclamation of Independence of Ireland. In fact, Pearse was proclaimed president of the Provisional Government and Commander in Chief of the republican troops.
Patrick Henry was born on November 10, 1879 in Dublin. His father, James Pearse, an Englishman, worked as a bricklayer and sculptor. In the 1850s he founded his own business associated with building and finishing works. Patrick had two sisters and a brother. In addition, James Pierse had four children (Emily, James, Agnes and Amy – the last two daughters died in infancy) from his first marriage. His mother, nee Margaret Brady, was Irish. Since childhood Patrick was fascinated by Irish language as well as the legends and stories about Irish heroes.
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