Simone de Beauvoir: The Philosopher Who Wrote The Second Sex and Lived by Her Own Radical Rules
Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949 and gave the feminist movement its intellectual foundation with a single sentence: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She lived as radicall...
14 Jun 20min
Michelangelo: The Genius in Dirty Boots Who Sculpted, Painted, and Fought His Way Through the Renaissance
Michelangelo was not the serene, cerebral artist of popular imagination. He was a brawler whose nose was broken in a fistfight with a rival sculptor, a miser who lived in squalor despite enormous weal...
14 Jun 20min
Mark Twain: The Radical Satirist Who Was Born and Died With Halley's Comet
Mark Twain was born in 1835 when Halley's Comet streaked across the sky, and he predicted he would die when it returned. He was right — he died on April 21, 1910, one day after the comet's closest app...
14 Jun 19min
Leo Tolstoy: The Aristocrat Who Renounced His Fortune and Became a Christian Anarchist
Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina — two of the greatest novels ever written — then renounced fiction, gave away his fortune, dressed as a peasant, and spent his final decades preaching...
14 Jun 21min
Karl Marx: From University Duelist to Author of the Most Influential Manifesto in History
Karl Marx was a university student who fought duels, a journalist who got expelled from multiple countries, a philosopher who spent decades in poverty while writing the book he believed would overthro...
14 Jun 24min
Jane Austen: The Ruthless Social Critic Hiding Behind Romance and Manners
Jane Austen is often reduced to a writer of polite romance — bonnets, balls, and marriage plots. But behind the drawing-room comedy was one of the sharpest social critics in English literature, a woma...
14 Jun 22min
J.D. Salinger: The Recluse Behind The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 and captured the voice of adolescent alienation so precisely that the novel has never gone out of print. Then he did something no famous writer i...
14 Jun 21min
Immanuel Kant: The Reclusive Clockwork Professor Who Rewrote the Rules of Reality
Immanuel Kant never traveled more than ten miles from his hometown of Konigsberg, kept a daily routine so precise that neighbors set their clocks by his afternoon walk, and produced a body of work tha...
14 Jun 22min
