7190: Stephen King — The Real Monsters Behind America's Master of Horror | pplpod
Stephen King has sold over 350 million books by writing about monsters, but the real horrors in his work come from alcoholism, domestic violence, isolation, and the ordinary cruelties people inflict o...
16 Kesä 22min
7189: Isaac Asimov — The Paradoxical Life of Science Fiction's Greatest Mind | pplpod
Isaac Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books spanning nearly every category of the Dewey Decimal System. He was terrified of flying, never learned to swim, and spent most of his life in a small apartme...
16 Kesä 19min
7188: Samuel Johnson — The Man Who Defined the English Language Alone | pplpod
Samuel Johnson spent nine years compiling a dictionary of the English language almost entirely by himself. The French Academy needed forty scholars and fifty-five years to produce theirs. Johnson did ...
16 Kesä 21min
7187: Bob Marley — The Bullet Scars Behind the World's Most Famous Smile | pplpod
Two days before a peace concert in Kingston, gunmen burst into Bob Marley's home and shot him, his wife, and his manager. He performed the concert anyway, lifting his shirt onstage to show the bandage...
16 Kesä 25min
7186: The Blues Giant Who Traded Ledgers for Licks | pplpod
Before the stage lights and the wailing guitar, there was an accounting textbook. One of the blues' greatest figures started with plans for a respectable career in numbers before the pull of music pro...
16 Kesä 24min
7185: W.B. Yeats — The Bizarre Afterlife of Ireland's Greatest Poet | pplpod
W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize, led the Irish Literary Revival, and wrote some of the most quoted poetry in the English language. Then he died in France in 1939, and things got strange — his body was ...
16 Kesä 19min
7184: Sidney Poitier — From Dishwasher to Hollywood’s Barrier-Breaking Leading Man | pplpod
Sidney Poitier arrived in New York from the Bahamas barely literate and working as a dishwasher. He taught himself to read with newspapers, was laughed out of his first audition, then became the first...
16 Kesä 21min
7183: Sergei Prokofiev — The Composer Who Died in Stalin’s Shadow on the Same Day | pplpod
Sergei Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953 — the same day as Joseph Stalin. The dictator’s death consumed all public attention, and one of the century’s greatest composers was buried with almost no mourne...
16 Kesä 20min
