Charles Donald Lowrie (1875–1925) left his Massachusetts home as a young man and hopscotched westward working as a stenographer, construction camp timekeeper, bookkeeper, railroad laborer, and traveling salesman before finding himself in Los Angeles starving and broke save for a vandalized nickel in his pocket
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was an eccentric and reclusive Serbian-American inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his lifelong feud with Thomas Edison, pioneering wireless technology, and his many contributions to the design of modern alternating current (AC) electricity. His autobiography My Inventions,
Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney; 1876–1916) was a prolific American short-story writer, novelist, journalist, adventurer, and social activist, who pioneered accessible commercial fiction with two of his best-known works The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), which established him as one
Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English author and essayist and considered one of the most important modernist literary figures of the 20th century. She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device, which she wielded masterfully in "perhaps
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was a reclusive novelist who in the 1950s became known in literary circles as "the English Secret," and was considered austere and unassuming by all who had the rare fortune to meet her. Publicly, she was so modest that any praise of
Hermann Karl Hesse (1877–1962) was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He found early popularity as an author in his native Germany but was soon embroiled in public controversy following the publication of an essay
Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869–1951) in his rich and varied lifetime was an English broadcasting narrator, Canadian farmer, New York newspaper reporter, hotel operator, journalist, bartender, secretary, mystic, teacher, adventurer, novelist, and short-story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was the pen name of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a Russian-American writer and philosopher known for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. The tenets of which are espoused in all of her writings, but especially in her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead
Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940) was a Pennsylvania-based journalist and science fiction author, best known as the creator of one of the genre's most well-known Radium Age (1904-33) characters: Buck Rogers. Whose popularity quickly dominated comic strip and radio serials of the early 20th century, culminating
Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was the pen name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a prolific Welsh author, and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction often depicting man at war with stifling scientific materialism,