- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(born 1928) Powerful Pulitzer-Prize winning American playwright, known for such searing and revealing works as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962, movie 1966). While his works have been shaped by experimentation with absurdist visions and new theatrical techniques, he also grapples with American social issues and has produced notable explorations of women’s reflections on American culture (Grandma in American Dream, 1960, or Three Tall Women, 1991). Other well-known works include The Zoo Story (1959), The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) and Tiny Alice (1964)
Industry:Culture
(born 1928) Singer, songwriter, producer, musician, “Soul Brother No. 1” and “Mr Dynamite,” James Brown emerged as a distinctive force in popular music in 1956 with “Please, Please, Please” backed by his Famous Flames. Born in South Carolina, Brown rose from rural poverty a childhood as a shoeshine boy and convicted juvenile delinquent to fashion a unique form of gritty gospel-influenced R&B. The James Brown Show Live at the Apollo (1963) is one of the great popular music albums of all time. Brown pioneered funk music and crossed over to white audiences with the hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965). Brown combined his grainy deep throated shrieking and shouting with pulsing polyrhythms, staccato horns and guitars, and an exhilarating stage show to earn the title of “the hardest working man in show business.” In the late 1960s, in the midst of the cultural and political turmoil in America, Brown became an ambiguous political figure, singing militant lyrics like “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) and touring Africa while entertaining American troops in Korea and Vietnam and encouraging black capitalism instead of ghetto rioting. Working with a new young band the JBs in the early 1970s, Brown recorded influential hit records—Sex Machine (1970), Super Bad (1970) and Soul Power (1971). Brown’s influence on all black popular music from the 1950s through the 1990s was so powerful that he could rightly claim to be “the original disco man” and the original rapper.
Industry:Culture
(1928 – 1974) Poet. Her deeply troubled life was shadowed by bouts of mental illness, addiction and preoccupations with death and suicide. These added power and terror to her oftenconfessional poetry in works like To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and The Death Notebooks (1974), published in the year that she committed suicide.
Industry:Culture
(1928 – 1982) American princess. Kelly born into a wealthy Irish Catholic Philadelphia family passed through a striking albeit brief screen career (1951–6) into legend. Her roles sometimes played off her model’s beauty and patrician heritage (Rear Window, 1954; High Society, 1956), although her Academy Award came for going against the grain in The Country Girl (1954). In 1956 Kelly abandoned films to marry Monaco’s Prince Rainier, whom she met while filming with Hitchcock. After this “fairy-tale ending,” she assumed new roles as mother, monarch and elegant cosmopolitan icon until her death in an automobile accident.
Industry:Culture
(1928 – 1987) Ensconced during the 1960s in the subcultural scene of his New York studio, “The Factory” Andy Warhol transposed and transcended the defining ethos of his industrial Pittsburgh origins. In his silkscreen icons of American consumer culture and its celebrities, from Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola to Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Warhol turned mass culture into high art. As such, his work was the pop art avatar of postmodernism, fundamentally blurring and destabilizing the boundary between “avant-garde and kitsch” that had been so rigorously maintained in high modernist criticism and practice.
Industry:Culture
(born 1929) African American novelist of Caribbean (Barbadian) ancestry who emerged onto the literary scene with her autobiographical novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959).
Much of Marshall’s writing deals with themes of estrangement of contemporary African Americans from their cultural roots and the need to journey back and deal with the ancestors and heritage to find renewal, questions that reverberate with the works of Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison and others. Among her major works are The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Daughters (1991).
Industry:Culture
(born 1929) Winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989), Canadian-born Gehry is known for the sculptural elements in his designs, as well as his ability to relate buildings to a human scale. Gehry’s work reached celebrity status with the spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997). The titanium-clad building consists of multitudinous curves designed with the help of the most advanced computer-design programs. Gehry’s work has prompted the question: what comes after postmodernism? In addition to the Guggenheim, Gehry has designed two lines of furniture and continues to design at his firm based in Los Angeles, CA.
Industry:Culture
(1929 – 1968) Martin Luther King, Jr. was the most charismatic and influential leader in the US civil rights struggle, 1954–68. His philosophy of non-violent direct action in resistance to unjust laws was founded upon the teachings of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi and refined through his own study of religion and philosophy at Morehouse College and Boston University A middle-class, educated son of a southern black Baptist minister, King was representative of the new generation of southern African Americans after the Second World War who refused to submit to continued white oppression in the South.
His beliefs in non-violence and the moral necessity for equality became the strategy of the entire movement.
King first emerged as a leader of the Movement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–6. His primary base of operation was always the South. He was less successful in attempting to apply his beliefs and tactics to the problems of African American ghettos in the North. His philosophy galvanized white as well as black Americans, incorporating both in his vision of a “beloved community” in which there was justice for all. His beliefs, courage in the advocacy of them and his achievements in the face of violent resistance by Southern white authority brought him vilification from conservatives at home, but international acclaim abroad. While the FBI conducted investigations to discredit King, the international Nobel Committee presented King with its Peace Prize in 1964.
King’s crowning moment was his “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in August, 1963. His greatest victories were passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King’s opposition to injustice, however, was not confined by region, race or class. He reluctantly sacrificed much of his credibility among many black as well as white followers and much of his influence in national political circles by continuing to protest against poverty within the US and the unjust war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s. The official disfavor such actions brought from the highest levels of government and civil society made King more vulnerable to the forces of reaction. He was assassinated in April 1968 by a white gunman in Memphis, TN while participating in a garbage workers’ strike.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s articulation and advocacy of the ethical principles of his faith and the political ideals upon which the United States was founded inspired the nation. His murder for those same beliefs so shamed its people, black and white, that a majority coalesced to create a national holiday in his honor. In 1986 the federal government established January 15 as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the only national holiday to honor a non-office-holding US civilian. King’s legacy however, transcends such institutionalization. His moral philosophy and his advocacy of justice and equality for all people regardless of race, class or gender continue to inspire suffering peoples throughout the world.
Industry:Culture
(1929 – 1989) Multi-talented actor turned independent director in 1960. Dissatisfied with Hollywood, his films define a rugged style both cinematically and emotionally His handheld camera, long takes, improvisation, emotional themes often dealing with love and marriage, and personal vision permeate films like A Woman under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980), both starring his wife Gina Rowlands. Cassavetes became a pioneer for independent, personal film-making before its apotheosis in the 1990s. His son Nick (1959–) has followed him as a director.
Industry:Culture
(1929 – 1993) Female actor. Surviving Nazi occupation in Holland to become a dancer and model, Hepburn brought both ethereal beauty and European style to American movies from her Hollywood debut in Roman Holiday (1953) onwards. Hepburn moved easily between casual humor and graceful elegance in films like Funny Face (1957) or Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Nominated for five Academy Awards, she essentially retired from the screen after Wait Until Dark (1967). Before her death, she became a UNICEF ambassador; in the 1990s she continued to be revered as a fashion icon.
Industry:Culture
