Claudette Colbert’s mixture of beauty, sophistication, wit, and vivacity quickly made her one of the film industry’s most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Though Colbert (1903–1996) beg ...

Jazz legend Cootie Williams left home to start his career as a professional musician at the age of fifteen. In 1940, after eleven years as one of the major soloists with the Duke Ellington orchestra, ...

In Driftin’ on a Memory: Celebrating Seventy Years of The Isley Brothers, Trenton Bailey tells the story of this groundbreaking musical act. The Isley Brothers began recording as a vocal trio consisting ...

With over 350 complete or excerpted letters, most previously unpublished, To Absent Friends: Eudora Welty's Correspondence with Frank Lyell forms an epistolary narrative of Welty’s writing life and her n ...

As an American singer, conductor, composer, and actor, Frank Sinatra, Jr. (1944–2016), had a long and successful music career and was recognized for his many contributions to American popular song. Yet, h ...

Chris Claremont (b. 1950) is best known for his landmark sixteen-year author run on Uncanny X-Men. This is the longest author run in Marvel Comics history, one that saw X-Men go from a title on the verge ...

Ray Milland (1907–1986) was the inaugural Welshman to win the Best Actor Academy Award, as well as a performer boasting a rich and varied oeuvre from the silent era in 1920s Britain to New Hollywood in t ...

Born to a formerly enslaved mother and a white planter father, P. B. S. Pinchback (1837–1921) became the first African American governor in the United States. His tenure as governor of Louisiana was brief—a m ...

American actress and socialite Diana Barrymore (1921–1960) was a figure often overshadowed by her famous lineage and tragic narrative. In Too Fast, Too Short: The Life of Diana Barrymore, author Jennifer ...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American original—a luminous literary theorist, an erratic genius, and an analyst par excellence of human obsession and compulsion. The scope of his literary achievements and ...