Category: people

Gedda’s career lasted well into his 70s, much longer than is usual for classical singers. “Over a quarter-century, he sang 367 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, from his debut in the title role of Gounod’s ‘Faust’ in 1957 to his final performance, as Alfredo in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata,’ in 1983.”

Emecheta always knew what she wanted to do: “One day she was beaten in front of her class when she announced that she wanted to be a writer. It was a cherished dream, born when she visited the family’s ancestral village, Ibuza, and listened to a blind aunt telling stories about their people, the Ibo.”

Harlow wrote about women and men who lived and wrote in struggles all over the world. “One of her premises was that imaginative writing was a way to gain control over ‘the historical and cultural record.’ This, she wrote, ‘is seen from all sides as no less crucial than the armed struggle.'”

Copeland made history when she became the first African-American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater, but prior to that, she was placed in the public eye when her 2014 commercial with Under Armour went viral.

“From a certain angle one can see Spielberg as one of those archetypal children of the mythic suburbs, cheery on the outside and nervewracked on the inside, a myth on which his own films have worked variations time and again. So much of his early trajectory feels so generic.”

The original biography, “O’Neill,” which they started when they were in their early 30s, clocked in at 964 pages, but was energetically paced and chock-full of interviews with O’Neill’s ex-wives, friends from his boyhood and seaman days, and the real people on whom his dramatic characters were based. The book, published in 1962, became a best seller.

You’ve heard of him (even if Donald Trump hadn’t). His pose and his outfit were almost always the same, and he had specific reasons for seeking out the camera as much as he did – reasons that went well beyond self-regard.

A scrupulous musician, Gedda was admired for his fantastic versatility: he was convincing and stylish in Mozart, bel canto, Italian, French, German, and Russian repertoire, capable in opera, art song, and even operetta.

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was born a slave, raised by an abolitionist, and began her career before the Civil War with the nickname “the Black Swan,” a counterpart to the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind.

While he founded the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia, a reading orchestra which he directed for a dozen years, and led orchestras in West Virginia and Florida, his longest post – 30 years – was at the Reading Symphony in Pennsylvania.