- Industry: Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 1330
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(1919 – 1965) Haunted explorer of the dark recesses of American life, Jackson discovered horrific dimensions of family, marriage and community in novels like We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1953). She provides a chilling rearrangement of American values of individual responsibility collective identity and freedom in her classic story “The Lottery” (1949), read by generations of American students. Personal reminiscence and a selection of her unpublished stories were made available under the editorship of her children, L. Hyman and S. Stewart, in the 1995 collection Just an Ordinary Day.
Industry:Culture
(1919 – 1972) An outstanding college athlete at UCLA, Jackie Robinson served in the Second World War and received an honorable discharge after being court martialed for refusing to conform to segregation in his army base. Later, he played professional baseball with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues until recognized by Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers for his “great experiment” of desegregating major-league baseball.
Signed by the Dodgers organization in 1945, Robinson played for the minor-league Montreal Royals. Joining the Dodgers in 1947, he became the first African American to play major-league baseball, enduring opponents’ racist comments and runners’ attempts to spike him with their cleats. Nevertheless, he went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Dodgers and became a spokesperson for civil rights. The burden of the “great experiment,” however, took its toll—he aged rapidly and died only fifteen years after retiring from baseball.
Industry:Culture
(1919 – 1987) Favorite of the “blue-haired” set, this flamboyant pianist was better known for his onstage theatrics than his music, mostly romantic period music and popular standards in an upbeat manner. Bejeweled in flowing sequined robes with his trademark candelabra atop his grand piano, he bantered with his audience and won their love. Television made him famous and Las Vegas kept him in the public eye. Although he was so outrageous, discussion of his personal or sexual life never seemed to enter the public fray; he once sued a reporter for stating that he was gay and won. His death from AIDS, which he tried to conceal, helped publicize the disease.
Industry:Culture
(1919 – 1998) Fiery segregationist politician. Losing the Alabama governorship to a racist contender in 1958, Wallace became a vehement segregationist who would be elected in 1962, 1970, 1974 and 1982, with his wife Lurleen becoming an interregnum governor in 1966.
Wallace began his first term promising “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” He tried to bar blacks from the University of Alabama and faced Martin Luther King, Jr. in the state capital. Wallace unsuccessfully attempted to parlay his fame into the Democratic presidential nomination in 1964; as candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968 he received 10 million votes (13.5 percent of the popular total), underscoring growing racial concerns outside the South. In 1972 he reemerged as a Democratic “regional” law and order contender, again showing strength in the Northeast and Midwest as well as the South; this campaign was cut short by an assassination attempt that left him paralyzed. Thereafter, he stayed with his Alabama power base, gradually developing a more inclusive development platform that even attracted black votes before his 1987 retirement.
Industry:Culture
(born 1920) Bradbury an explorer of the imagination, began his publishing career in the 1940s in pulp magazines. His later stories and novels combine science-fiction scenarios with deeply human twists of the imagination in search of meaning and identity and poetic imagery He has also shown a cinematic awareness of American oddities and possibilities.
Major works include the Martian Chronicles (1950), which reinvent an American narrative of discovery and adaptation, and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).
His Fahrenheit 451 was also made into a movie (1966).
Industry:Culture
(1920 – 1966) Beautiful, sexually ambiguous and hungry Clift embodied a troubled and introspective masculinity at odds with conventional representations of 1950s family and gender roles—a tension apparent as he plays off John Wayne in Red River (1948). In consummately American settings like this Western, the army (From Here to Eternity, 1953 and The Young Lions, 1958) or the inter-class drama of A Place in the Sun (1951), Clift haunts us with powerful acting and uncertain meaning. His last decade was overshadowed by a devastating automobile accident and consequent deterioration.
Industry:Culture
(1920 – 1992) Russian-born biochemistry professor at Boston University, Asimov became better known for his science fiction and popularizations of science, especially for young people.
An extraordinarily prolific writer (over 300 books), Asimov is remembered for his visionary Foundation trilogy (1951–3) whose images of a galactic empire in collapse certainly prefigure Star Wars. He returned to writing about this universe in the 1980s with new volumes, while continuing to write both scientific texts and popular mysteries.
Industry:Culture
(1920 – 1994) German-born American and Californian fiction writer, prose poet and misanthrope, Bukowski published more than forty books, many with small presses. Chronicler of the seamy his narrators define angry drunks (he wrote the movie Barfly), unapologetic macho men and beat geniuses too deeply invested in “real life” to be appreciated by critics. In Bukowski’s monotonous poems, speakers celebrate booze, bad sex and bitterness as if they are being brutally honest, but Bukowski did not invite readers to join him in his America. His appraisal may be summed up as follows: “Fuck You. You couldn’t take it.”
Industry:Culture
(1920 – 1996) Psychologist and apostle of the hallucinogen LSD (d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). As a Harvard professor, influenced by Aldous Huxley, Leary tested LSD and psilocybin among criminals, seminarians and other volunteers. Expelled from Harvard, he explored altered consciousness and new social visions, becoming a 1960s guru to artists and hippies. After his 1967 drug arrest, the Black Panthers helped him flee to Algeria and Afghanistan; he later served prison time. An amalgam of prophet and comedian, Leary epitomized an intellectual drug culture crushed by conservative Republican dominance.
He died of cancer, after debating his suicide on the Internet.
Industry:Culture
(1920 – 1999) Alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Bayard Rustin, Farmer is considered one of the principal leaders of the civil-rights movement. He helped found CORE in 1942 and became its director, leading sit-ins and the freedom rides. Freedom When? (1965) revealed his continuing commitment to non-violent resistance, though he began to support some tenets of Black Power, such as black self-determination and local control. He left CORE in 1968 and stood for Congress, losing to Shirley Chisholm, and was appointed assistant secretary of Health, Education and Welfare by Nixon in 1969, but resigned from this position after a year.
Industry:Culture
