7196: Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Opium Dreams and the Messy Genius of English Poetry | pplpod
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after waking from an opium dream and was interrupted by a visitor before he could finish it. The fragment became one of the most famous poems in the English la...
16 Jun 22min
7195: B.B. King — The Man Who Made Lucille Sing and the Blues Weep | pplpod
B.B. King named his guitar Lucille after nearly dying in a fire caused by two men fighting over a woman by that name. He played her every night for the next fifty years, developing a vibrato and strin...
16 Jun 20min
7194: Rimsky-Korsakov — The Naval Officer Who Became Russia's Greatest Orchestrator | pplpod
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval cadet who composed a symphony while sailing around the world, despite having almost no formal musical training. He later taught himself harmony, counterpoint, and o...
16 Jun 21min
7193: Percy Bysshe Shelley — The Unburnt Heart and a Radical Poet's Wild Life | pplpod
When Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was cremated on an Italian beach, his friend Edward Trelawny reached into the fire and pulled out his heart, which had refused to burn. The organ was kept by Shelley's...
16 Jun 23min
7192: H.P. Lovecraft — The Tragic Recluse Who Created Cosmic Horror | pplpod
H.P. Lovecraft died in poverty at forty-six, unknown outside a small circle of pulp magazine readers. Today his invented mythology — Cthulhu, Arkham, the Necronomicon — is embedded so deeply in global...
16 Jun 21min
7191: Domenico Scarlatti — How Spain Transformed a Baroque Italian into a Genius | pplpod
Domenico Scarlatti spent the first half of his career in his father's shadow, writing competent Italian operas that no one remembers. Then he moved to Spain, heard flamenco guitars and castanets, and ...
16 Jun 18min
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 Jun 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 Jun 19min
