Captain Scott

Captain Robert Falcon Scott was born on June 6th, 1868 in Stoke Damerel, England. He was a Royal Naval officer and Antarctic explorer. During the “Race to the South Pole” Scott came in second and on his way back to their base, he and his four companions died due to the rough terrain in the South Pole.

In 1901, Scott commanded the National Antarctic Expedition through many adventures. The major achievement of the expedition was an exploration of the Ross Sea. During the Terra Nova expedition (1910-1913), when Scott and his party members decided to head home after a year spent undertaking science work, they began to slow deteriorate in the unpredictable and rough terrain of the cold weather. Slowly, each member started to weaken and die due to miscalculations, injuries, frostbite, malnutrition and exhaustion.

Scott died on March 29th, 1912 on the Ross Ice Shelf and was found in a tent containing two more bodies including Scott. Rock samples of the experiments they were working on were found near the corpses. Diaries were also found near the bodies; these diaries spoke of their last moments in the dying winter.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Scott

Billy Holiday

Billie Holiday, born as Eleanora Fagan, was born on April 7th 1915 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was an American singer known for the difficult times in her life and her singing voice. Holiday is considered to have one of the greatest emotive jazz voices of all time.

Holiday had a horrible life throughout a life; she admitted to using hard drugs in the 1940s. She married a trombonist Jimmy Monroe in 1941, and also took up with trumpeter Joe Guy, her drug dealer. In 1947, she split with Guy and divorced Monroe, and was also sentenced to jail for eight months due to drugs.

By the 1950s, Holiday’s relentless abuse to herself with drug abuse, drinking, and other abusive actions gave her voice a more swell and coarsen her voice. Holiday is considered to be a prime example of a artist with a bittersweet ending.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday

Around the World in Eighty Days

Around the World in Eighty Days is a adventure novel that was first published in 1873 by a French writer Jules Verne. In the story, two men made a bet that they can circle around the world in 80 days on a £20,000.

This book was written around the difficult times of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Jules Verne was having a series of unfortunate events when he was writing this book: he enrolled as a coastguard, had money difficulties, recently his father died, and also witnessed a public execution. Despite all these events, Verne was very excited about his work on this new book he was writing, Around the World in Eighty Days, which came across his mind one day in a café while reading a newspaper.

A film adaptation was made into movie directed by Frank Coraci in 2004 with Jackie Chan, Steve Coorage, and Natalie Denise Sperl.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_80_Days

Martin Scorsese

* Cultural Reference Chapters 21-23 *

Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 and is considered one of the greatest crime-genre directors of all time, directing Academy Award movies such as Taxi Driver, Good Fellas, The Aviator, and as a long anticipated come-back in 2006: The Departed.

Scorsese’s father, Luciano Charles Scorsese, and mother, Catherine Scorsese, both resided in New York when they gave birth to Martin in 1942. It was the contemporary-realistic cinemas in New York that gave Scorsese the passion go follow his dreams as a director.

Scorsese was a multi- Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Directors Guild of America, award winner and was nominated for Best Director five times, but never won.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorsese

Lassie Come Home

Lassie come home is a 1943 film set in England during the Depression-era that tells the story of a poor boy’s dog who was sold to a rich man and had to return home to her original owner. This movie stars Roddy McDowall, Donald Crisp, Dame May Whitty, Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce, Elsa Lanchester, Elizabeth Taylor, Ben Webster, J. Pat O’Malley, Alan Napier, and Lassie. A collie male dog named Pal played Lassie.

The original novel Lassie Come Home was written by Eric Knight, and the movie was directed Fred M. Wilcox and adapted from the book by Hugo Butler. After this movie, many other movies and television series starred Lassie, the collie male dog.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lassie_Come_Home

Richard Burton

Richard Burton was born on November 10, 1925 in Celigny, Switzerland. He was a Welsh actor, and was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. He is well known for his vocal style, and was nominated seven times for the Academy Awards for acting but never won.

Burton is most known for his roles in Look Back in Anger, King Arthur’s Camelot on Broadway, and Cleopatra (1963). During a filming, he met Elizabeth Taylor and immediately fell in love with her. Once they married, people began to see many on-screen collaborations with two of them.

During Burton’s fourth marriage with Suzy Hunt, he suddenly died of cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Switzerland. He was only 58 years old when he died and was buried in Switzerland in a red suit.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burton

Balzac

Honore de Balzac was born on May 20th, 1799 in Tours, France. He was a French novelist and playwright who published almost 100 novels. Balzac is well known to be the founding father of realism in European literature. His novels, most being comedies, consists of many well-defined characters, and descriptions in exceptional detail of the scene of action. It is also his trademark to bring back particular characters in various novels repeatedly.

As Balzac’s health failed in 1849, he traveled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a wealthy landowner. Balzac and Eveline married in Berdyczow in 1850. Because of his health problems, he died three months after his wedding.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balzac

Jack Nicholson

* Cultural References Chapter 17-20 *

John Joseph Nicholson is an Academy Award winner and seven time Golden Globe winner American method actor most known for his dark-themed characters. Nicholson was born on April 22, 1937 in Neptune, New Jersey at the Jersey Shore Medical Center.

In high school, Nicholson was voted as “class clown” by the Class of 1954. A theater and a drama award at the school are named in his honor. In his later acting years, he won many awards and even received a Kennedy Center Honors in 2001. Nicholson is best known for his films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, As Good as it Gets, and Tim Burton’s Batman.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_nicholson

King Lear

King Lear was written by William Shakespeare and published in 1587. This tragedy is very well known and is played by many great actors throughout time. There are two different versions of the play: The True Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters, which appeared in 1608, and The Tragedy of King Lear which appeared in 1623. The two are commonly printed in a regular text version. Yet many editors say that each version has its own delicacy.

Since World War II, it has been considered to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest achievements; especially because of its description on the nature of human suffering and kinship on a cosmic scale.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in Dorset, England. His father worked as a stonemason and his mother was a ambitious and well-read person. His mother supplied Hardy’s formal education, which ended when he turned 16 when he became John Hick’s apprentice.

Thomas Hardy became an English novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. Most of his work depicts characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy published his first poetry in his fifties and has come to be as well known as his novels.

Hardy died from an illness called pleurisy in January 11, 1928. On his deathbed, his final poem was dictated by his wife.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono was born on February 18, 1933. She is a Japanese musician and artist and is currently living in New York City as an American citizen.

Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. In a performance art called Cut Piece, she sat on stage and invited members of the audience to use scissors to cut off her clothing until she was completely naked. As a form of conceptual art, she wrote a book of instructions called Grapefruit. This book included instructions that are to be used within the mind of the reader through Zen-like thoughts.

As Ono’s musical career, she collaborated with groups such as John Cage and jazz legend Ornette Coleman. Her music changed after marriage. Her contribution to the album Double Fantasy was considered to be better than John Lennon’s.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono

Charles Manson

* Cultural Reference Chapters 14-16 *

Charles Milles Manson was born on November 12, 1934, and was known to be the leader of the Manson Family. The Manson Family was a cult consisting of hippie like people that began to form in San Francisco in 1967. Manson was convicted of committing the 1969 Los Angeles Tate-LaBianca murders, where members of his cult were given instructions to do so.

Manson was an unemployed ex-convict who spent nearly half his life in institutions for correcting his inhuman behaviors from his minor and major offenses. Before the period of the murders, Manson found himself in the music industry where he had a chance to associate with Dennis Wilson. Oddly, once Manson was charged with the crimes, the songs written by Manson and performed by him and members of the Manson Family were released commercially.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson

Nefertiti

Nefertiti was the Great Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. She was the mother in law and probable stepmother of the Pharaoh Tutakhamun. One of the daughters married Tutankhamen. Her name roughly translates to “the beautiful/perfect woman has come”.

She is mostly known for her famous bust. The bust itself is notable for expressing the understanding Ancient Egyptians had regarding realistic facial proportions.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who was born in Tagnrog on January 1860, was a Russian short story writer and playwright. He produced four classic playwrites during his brief playwriting career. His short stories are more well known and holds high esteem by writers and critics around the world.

Chekhov gave up on the theatre floor after a reception of his has gone horribly wrong (The Seagull in 1896). One of Chekhov’s short stories was written for money, but his artistic values grew. He made formal innovations that have influenced the modern short stories.

Anton died of tuberculosis at a health spa of Badenweiler, Germany, on July 15, 1904.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov

Dante

Dante Degli Alighieri was born between May 14/June 13, 1265. He was an Italian poet from Florence. Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) is considered to be one of the best works of literature ever written.

Dante was born into a remarkable family of Florence, the Alighieri family. His mother, Bella Degli Abati, died when Dante was only seven years old. After his mother’s death, Alighiero soon married again to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. This woman bore two more children, Dante’s brother Francesco and sister Tana.

Records of Dante’s don’t seem to specify his education, and some assume he simply studied at home. Where ever he studied, his interests in poetry took the best of him and he remained to be one of the greatest poets to this day.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante

Lord Byron

* Cultural Reference Chapters 12-13 *

George Gordon Byron was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Lord Byron has many reputable works. Most of these works are narrative poems including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. Many of his works later on were considered unfinished when he died. Lord Byron is known to be one of the greatest European poets and is still very famous

Lord Byron’s life was as interesting as his writings. He had many love affairs, debts to pay, separations, and accusations of having intimate relationships with family members. He was also a regional leader of Italy’s revolutionary organization called the Carbonari. Unfortunately Lord Byron died from fever in Missolonghi.
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice