pplpod

Andy Warhol hid behind a silver wig, dark glasses, and a deadpan persona so complete that even his closest associates were never sure what was real. The man who turned Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn...

14 Jun 23min

Andrew Carnegie arrived in America as a penniless Scottish immigrant and built the largest steel empire in the world. Then he gave nearly all of it away, funding libraries, universities, and concert h...

14 Jun 26min

Soren Kierkegaard was engaged to the woman he loved, then broke off the engagement for reasons he spent the rest of his short life trying to explain — to himself, to her, and to the reading public thr...

14 Jun 20min

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the most important novels in American literature, and died penniless in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her manuscripts were nearl...

14 Jun 20min

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the Jazz Age, wrote The Great Gatsby, and died at forty-four in a Hollywood apartment believing his life's work had been forgotten. Gatsby had sold poorly, his final novel ...

14 Jun 22min

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and then refused to have one in his study. He considered it an intrusion, a distraction from the work that actually mattered to him — teaching the deaf, ex...

14 Jun 21min

Voltaire made his first fortune by exploiting a mathematical flaw in the French national lottery — and spent the rest of his life using that financial independence to pick fights with kings, churches,...

14 Jun 22min

Cornelius Vanderbilt started with a single borrowed boat and built the largest fortune in American history through a combination of brilliant business instinct and total indifference to the rules. He ...

14 Jun 21min