BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Born: January 17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706 - Boston, Massachusetts

Died: April 17, 1790 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Franklin ended his formal education at 10, and at 12 he was apprenticed to his
brother, a printer. His first enthusiasm was for poetry, but he soon turned to
prose. He achieved much of what was to become his characteristic style from
imitating the writing in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's famous periodical The
Spectator.
Around 1729 he became the printer of paper currency for Pennsylvania and other
American colonies. In 1729 he purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette, which would
become generally acknowledged as among the best of the colonial newspapers,
and in 1732 he founded Poor Richard's Almanack, whose proverbs and aphorisms
emphasizing prudence, industry, and honesty would become part of American lore
for many decades thereafter. He became prosperous and devoted much energy to
promoting public services in Philadelphia, including a library, fire department,
hospital, and insurance company, as well as an academy that would later become
the University of Pennsylvania. In 1748 he gave up management of his
publications to devote himself to science and inventing; his inventions would
include the Franklin stove and bifocal spectacles, and his famous experiments in
electricity led to the invention of the lightning rod.
He served 15 years in the colonial legislature (1736-51). He spent the years 1757-
62 in London representing Pennsylvania in a dispute over taxation of lands held
by the Penn family. In 1764 he was sent back to London, where he helped secure
repeal of the Stamp Act. His initial belief in a unified colonial government under
British rule gradually changed over the issue of taxation. He remained in England
until 1775, when he departed in anticipation of war. Back in Philadelphia he
served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, where he helped draft
the Declaration of Independence.
In 1776 he traveled to France to seek military and financial aid for the colonies.
There he became a hero to the French people, the personification of the
unsophisticated nobility of the New World. At the close of the Revolutionary War,
he was one of the diplomats chosen to negotiate peace with Britain. As a member
of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, he was instrumental in achieving adoption
of the U.S. Constitution. Through the years he wrote a large number of editorials,
articles, pamphlets, and monographs, principally on political and scientific
subjects. His celebrated Autobiography (written 1771-88) was published
posthumously. Franklin is remembered as one of the most extraordinary, brilliant,
and indispensable public servants in the country's history.

Works by Benjamin Franklin

Dictionary of American Literary Characters
Experiments in Electricity
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac
The Way to Wealth
Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion
Bagatelles from Passy
Cool Thoughts on The Present
Situation of Our Public Affairs

CLARK & LEWIS

Meriwether Lewis
Born: August 18, 1774, near Charlottesville, VA
Died: October 11, 1809, near Nashville, TN

William Clark
Born: August 1, 1770, Caroline County, VA
Died: September 1, 1838, St. Louis, MO
After serving in the army, Lewis in 1801 became private secretary to Pres.
Thomas Jefferson, who selected him to lead the first overland expedition to the
Pacific Northwest. Lewis asked that William Clark, a former army colleague, share
the command. In 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition set out from St. Louis to
explore the new lands added to the United States after the Louisiana Purchase.
The two men led a party of about 40 men up the Missouri River to winter in
present-day North Dakota. The next spring they hired Toussaint Charbonneau and
his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, as guides and interpreters. The expedition
traveled over the Continental Divide and canoed down several rivers to the mouth
of the Columbia River on the Pacific coast. After wintering in present-day Oregon,
the group returned to St. Louis to great acclaim in September 1806, having
traveled over 4,000 miles. Named governor of the Louisiana Territory, Lewis died
at 35 under mysterious circumstances in an inn en route to Washington, D.C.
Clark was named superintendent of Indian affairs, and also served as governor of
the Missouri Territory (1813-22).

Works by Lewis & Clark

History of the expedition under the command of Captains Lewis & Clarke to the
sources of the Missouri, thence across the Rocky Mountains and down the River
Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, performed during the years 1804-5-6 by order of
the Government of the United States

The journals kept by Lewis and others, edited by Nicholas Biddle and published in
1814, helped reinforce U.S. claims to the Oregon country. In blunt, forthright,
minimal prose, they document the Indian tribes, wildlife, and geography of the
vast region traversed, providing a matchless account of the discovery of a new
world.
 ABRAHAM LINCON

Born: February 12, 1809 - Near Hodgenville, Kentucky

Died: April 14, 1865 - Washington, D.C.
Born in poverty, he moved with his family to Indiana and Illinois. Largely self-
taught, he became a lawyer. He served in the state legislature (1834-41), moving
to Springfield, Ill., during his tenure, and in the U.S. House of Representatives
(1847-49). A supporter of the new Republican Party in its antislavery stand, in
1858 he ran for U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas; though
he was unsuccessful, their eloquent debates brought Lincoln to national attention.
In 1860 he won the Republican presidential nomination and was elected
president. Though Lincoln had expressed a moderate view on slavery during the
campaign, opposing only its extension into new states, the South seceded and the
Civil War began in 1861.

The war dominated Lincoln's administration. To unite the North and influence
foreign opinion, he issued the landmark Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. His
extraordinary Gettysburg Address later that year further ennobled the war's
purpose; it contains the most celebrated language ever spoken by an American
politician. He was reelected in 1864, and in his eloquent Second Inaugural
Address he called for moderation in reconstructing the South and in building a
harmonious Union. Five days after the war's end, he was shot by the fanatic John
Wilkes Booth. His reputation among U.S. presidents remains unsurpassed.

Works by Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg Address
House Divided
Letter to Mrs. Bixby
Lincoln's other celebrated writings include his House Divided speech of 1858, a
prelude to the Lincoln-Douglas debates; his Cooper Union Speech of February,
1860, leading up to his nomination; his Message to Congress of December 1,
1862; and his moving Letter to Mrs. Bixby, a woman who had lost five sons in
combat. More widely known during his lifetime than his serious oratory were his
pithy and often humorous aphorisms.

MARK TWAIN
Born: Nov. 30, 1835 - Florida, Missouri
Died: April 21, 1910 - Redding, Connecticut
Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the West Bank of the Mississippi. At 13 he
was apprenticed to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the
Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for the paper.
After working for a time as an itinerant printer, he rejoined Orion in Keokuk, Iowa,
until the fall of 1856, when he began another period of wandering with a
commission to write comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post. Only five
letters appeared, for on the way down the Mississippi he signed on as an
apprentice to a steamboat pilot, and for almost four years he plied the Mississippi,
after 1859 as a licensed pilot in his own right, until the Civil War put an end to
steamboat traffic.

In 1861 he joined Orion in a trip to the Nevada Territory and became a writer for
Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise. There, on Feb. 3, 1863, "Mark Twain" was
born when he signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym, a
riverman's term for water "two fathoms deep" and thus just barely safe for
navigation. In 1864 he left Nevada for California. At a mining camp he heard the
story which, retold as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865),
would made him famous.
In 1866 he visited Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union,
publishing letters on his trip and later giving popular lectures. He then set out on
a world tour for California's largest paper, the Alta California. The letters he wrote
over the next five months for it and for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune caught
the public fancy and, when revised for publication in 1869 as The Innocents
Abroad, established Twain as a popular favorite.

Works by Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1865)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner (1873)
Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
The Prince and The Pauper (1881)
Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895)
Following the Equator (1897)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
Letters From The Earth (1962)

He married in 1870 and moved with his wife to Hartford in 1871. In 1872 he
published Roughing It, a chronicle of an overland stagecoach journey and of his
adventures in the Pacific islands. He collaborated with his neighbor Charles
Dudley Warner on The Gilded Age (1873), a satire on financial and political
malfeasance that gave a name to the expansive post-Civil War era.

He continued to lecture with great success both at home and (in 1872-73) in
England. In 1876 he published Tom Sawyer, a narrative of youthful escapades. It
was followed in 1880 by A Tramp Abroad, in 1881 by The Prince and The Pauper,
and in 1883 by the autobiographical Life on the Mississippi. His next novel,
Huckleberry Finn (1884), is generally considered his finest and one of the
masterpieces of American fiction. In 1889 he published A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court, in which a commonsensical Yankee is transported back in
time to medieval Britain.

Various unsuccessful financial speculations, including his own publishing firm, left
him bankrupt in the early 1890s, but the returns from Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894),
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895), a lecture tour around the world, and
Following the Equator (1897), his account of the tour, made him solvent again.
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg was published with other stories and
sketches in 1900.

In 1903 he and his family settled near Florence, Italy. His wife died six months
later, and he expressed his grief, loneliness, and pessimism about humanity in
several late works, including Letters From The Earth (published 1962) and The
Mysterious Stranger (published 1916).

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Born: July 21, 1899 - Oak Park, Illinois
Died: July 2, 1961 - Ketchum, Idaho
On graduation from high school in 1917, Hemingway became a reporter for the
Kansas City Star. During World War I he served as an ambulance driver for the
American Red Cross; wounded on the Austro-Italian front, he was decorated for
heroism.
After recuperating in the United States, he sailed for France as a foreign
correspondent for the Toronto Star. In Paris he became part of the coterie of
expatriate Americans that included Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott
Fitzgerald. In 1925 his first important book, the superb story collection In Our
Time, was published. The following year he published The Sun Also Rises, the
novel with which he scored his first solid success.

Based in Paris, he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting
that by then was forming the background for much of his writing. His position as a
master of short fiction was advanced by Men Without Women (1927), with the
story "Hills Like White Elephants," and was confirmed by Winner Take Nothing
(1933), which included "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." The concentrated prose
style of these early works would influence British and American writers for
decades. Among the reading public, the novel A Farewell To Arms (1929), with its
powerful fusion of love story with war story, overshadowed both collections.

Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting are evident in Death in
the Afternoon (1932), a study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than
as sport. An African safari provided the subject for Green Hills of Africa (1935). To
Have And Have Not (1937) reflected his growing concern with social issues and
the worsening international situation.

As a correspondent he made four trips to Spain, then in the throes of civil war. He
raised money for the Loyalists and wrote the play The Fifth Column, set in
besieged Madrid, that was published with some of his best stories, including "The
Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows Of Kilimanjaro," in The
Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). The harvest of his
considerable experience of Spain was the novel For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940),
the best-selling of all his books.

Works by Ernest Hemingway

In Our Time (1925)
The Sun Also Rise (1926)
Men Without Women (1927)
A Farewell To Arms (1929)
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
To Have And Have Not (1937)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man And The Sea (1952, Pulitzer Prize)
Paris: A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
After seeing action in World War II, he returned to his home (since about 1940) in
Cuba. He received the Pulitzer Prize for the short novel The Old Man And The Sea
(1952), a book as enthusiastically praised as his previous novel, Across the River
and into the Trees (1950), had been damned. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature.

By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had led Hemingway to leave Cuba and settle in
Idaho. There, anxiety-ridden, depressed, and ill with cancer, he shot himself,
leaving behind many manuscripts. Two of his posthumously published books are
the admired memoir of his apprentice days in Paris: A Moveable Feast (1964), and
Islands in the Stream (1970), consisting of three closely related novellas.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
Born: September 25, 1897 - New Albany, Mississippi
Died: July 6, 1962 - near Oxford, Mississippi
Faulkner dropped out of high school in his second year, joined the Royal Air Force-
Canada in World War I (but did not fly), and later endured a brief stint at the
University of Mississippi before working at a series of odd jobs, including
university postmaster (1921-24). A neighbor helped fund publication of his first
book, the cycle of pastoral poems The Marble Faun (1924). His first novel,
Soldier's Pay (1926), told of the return to Georgia of a fatally wounded aviator.
Sartoris (1929) was the first of his Yoknapatawpha novels; The Sound And The
Fury (1929), his first masterwork, continued the cycle.

In the years 1930-42 Faulkner published two collections of stories, a second book
of poems (A Green Bough, 1933), and nine novels—As I Lay Dying (1930),
Sanctuary (1931), Light In August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and
Go Down, Moses (1942), which includes the story The Bear. By 1945, however, his
novels were effectively out of print. From 1932 until 1955 he worked
intermittently writing screenplays in Hollywood to supplement his meager income
from book royalties; his film scripts include To Have and Have Not (1944) and The
Big Sleep (1946).

His long-delayed ascent to international fame began with the publication in 1946
of the paperback Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, which introduced
his Yoknapatawpha cycle as a whole. Intruder in the Dust appeared in 1948. In
1949

Works by William Faulkner

The Marble Faun (1924)
Soldier's Pay (1926)
Sartoris (1929)
The Sound And The Fury (1929)
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Sanctuary (1931)
Light In August (1932)
A Green Bough, (1933)
Pylon (1935)
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
The Unvanquished (1938)
The Wild Palms (1939)
The Hamlet (1940)
Go Down, Moses (1942)
Intruder in the Dust (1948)
Collected Stories (1950)
Requiem for a Nun (play, 1951)
A Fable (1954, Pulitzer Prize)
The Town (1957)
The Mansion (1959)
The Reivers (1962, Pulitzer Prize)
Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize; his acceptance speech became the most
quoted of all Nobel Prize speeches.

Faulkner's Collected Stories, published in 1950, won the National Book Award.
Requiem for a Nun, a sequel to Sanctuary in the form of a three-act play with a
narrative prologue to each act, appeared in 1951. He worked nearly 10 years on
his longest novel, A Fable (1954, Pulitzer Prize), and he rounded out the
Yoknapatawpha story with The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers
(1962, Pulitzer Prize).