#15101
Norma Talmadge
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Norma Marie Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box-office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.
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Alf Torp
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Alf Torp was a Norwegian philologist and author. He is most known for his work with Indo-European and Nordic language history and meaning of ancient languages. Biography Alf Torp was born in Stryn, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. He became cand. philol. in 1877 at the Bergen Cathedral School. He was a student of Sophus Bugge, and during a stay in Leipzig in 1878-80 a student of Georg Curtius and Ernst Windisch. In 1881 he got his doctorate at the University of Leipzig with the dissertation Die Flexion des Pali in ihrem Verhältnis zum Sanskrit.
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Harry Partch
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music .
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Cannonball Adderley
1928 - 1975 (47 years)
Julian Edwin "Cannonball" Adderley was an American jazz alto saxophonist of the hard bop era of the 1950s and 1960s. Adderley is perhaps best remembered for the 1966 soul jazz single "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", which was written for him by his keyboardist Joe Zawinul and became a major crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts. A cover version by the Buckinghams, who added lyrics, also reached No. 5 on the charts. Adderley worked with Miles Davis, first as a member of the Davis sextet, appearing on the seminal records Milestones and Kind of Blue , and then on his own 1958 album Somethin' Else. He w...
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Lotte Lehmann
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Charlotte "Lotte" Pauline Sophie Lehmann was a German-American lyric soprano noted for her successful performances with international opera houses, on the recital stage and in teaching.She gave memorable appearances in the operas of Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Puccini, Mozart, and Massenet. The Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Sieglinde in Die Walküre and the title-role in Fidelio are considered her greatest roles. During her long career, Lehmann also made almost five hundred recordings in both opera and art song.
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Asta Nielsen
1881 - 1972 (91 years)
Asta Sofie Amalie Nielsen was a Danish silent film actress who was one of the most popular leading ladies of the 1910s and one of the first international movie stars. Seventy of Nielsen's 74 films were made in Germany where she was known simply as Die Asta .
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Augusta Webster
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Augusta Webster born in Poole, Dorset as Julia Augusta Davies, was an English poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Biography Augusta was the daughter of Vice-admiral George Davies and Julia Hume, she spent her younger years on board the ship he was stationed, the Griper.
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Albert Lortzing
1801 - 1851 (50 years)
Gustav Albert Lortzing was a German composer, librettist, actor and singer. He is considered to be the main representative of the German Spieloper, a form similar to the French opéra comique, which grew out of the Singspiel.
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Robert Planquette
1848 - 1903 (55 years)
Jean Robert Planquette was a French composer of songs and operettas. Several of Planquette's operettas were extraordinarily successful in Britain, especially Les cloches de Corneville , the length of whose initial London run broke all records for any piece of musical theatre up to that time. Rip Van Winkle also earned international fame.
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Edith Head
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Edith Head was an American costume designer who won a record eight Academy Awards for Best Costume Design between 1949 and 1973, making her the most awarded woman in the Academy's history. Head is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential costume designers in film history.
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Hermann Collitz
1855 - 1935 (80 years)
Hermann Collitz was a German historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist, who spent much of his career in the United States. Biography Born in Bleckede near Lüneburg in 1885. Collitz received a doctorate in 1878 at the University of Göttingen with a dissertation on "The Emergence of the Indo-Iranian Palatal Series" , and his 1885 habilitation degree at the University of Halle for "The Inflection of Nouns with Threefold Gradation in Old Indic and in Greek: the Cases of the Singular" .
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Big Joe Turner
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Joseph Vernon "Big Joe" Turner Jr. was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. According to songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him". Turner's greatest fame was due to his rock and roll recordings in the 1950s, particularly "Shake, Rattle and Roll", but his career as a performer endured from the 1920s into the 1980s.
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Ezio Pinza
1892 - 1957 (65 years)
Ezio Fortunato Pinza was an Italian opera singer. Pinza possessed a rich, smooth and sonorous voice, with a flexibility unusual for a bass. He spent 22 seasons at New York's Metropolitan Opera, appearing in more than 750 performances of 50 operas. At the San Francisco Opera, Pinza sang 26 roles during 20 seasons from 1927 to 1948. Pinza also sang to great acclaim at La Scala, Milan and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London.
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Carl Heinrich Graun
1704 - 1759 (55 years)
Carl Heinrich Graun was a German composer and tenor. Along with Johann Adolph Hasse, he is considered to be the most important German composer of Italian opera of his time. Biography Graun was born in Wahrenbrück in the Electorate of Saxony. In 1714, he followed his brother, Johann Gottlieb Graun, to the school of the Kreuzkirche, Dresden, and sang in the Dresdner Kreuzchor and the chorus of the Opernhaus am Zwinger. He studied singing with Christian Petzold and composition with . In 1724, Graun moved to Braunschweig, singing at the opera house and writing six operas for the company. In 1735...
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Frank Bridge
1879 - 1941 (62 years)
Frank Bridge was an English composer, violist and conductor. Life Bridge was born in Brighton, the ninth child of William Henry Bridge , a violin teacher and variety theatre conductor, formerly a master lithographic printer from a family of cordwainers, and his second wife, Elizabeth . His father "ruled the household with a rod of iron", and was insistent that his son spend regular long hours practising the violin; when Frank became sufficiently skilled, he would play with his father's pit bands, conducting in his absence, also arranging music and standing in for other instrumentalists. He s...
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Hans Richter
1843 - 1916 (73 years)
Johann Baptist Isidor Richter, or János Richter was an Austro-Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor. Biography Richter was born in Raab , Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire. His father was a local composer, conductor and regens chori Anton Richter. His mother was opera-singer Jozefa Csazenszky. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory. He had a particular interest in the horn, and developed his conducting career at several different opera houses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He became associated with Richard Wagner in the 1860s, and played the solo trumpet part in the 1870 private premiere of the Siegfried Idyll.
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Havergal Brian
1876 - 1972 (96 years)
William Havergal Brian was a prominent 20th-century English composer, librettist, and church organist. He is best known for having composed 32 symphonies, an unusually high number amongst his contemporaries, 25 of them after the age of 70, into late in his life. His best-known work is his Symphony No. 1, The Gothic, which calls for some of the largest orchestral forces demanded by a conventionally structured concert work.
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Billy Strayhorn
1915 - 1967 (52 years)
William Thomas Strayhorn was an American jazz composer, pianist, lyricist, and arranger who collaborated with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington for nearly three decades. His compositions include "Take the 'A' Train," "Chelsea Bridge," "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," and "Lush Life".
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Richard Paul Wülker
1845 - 1910 (65 years)
Richard Paul Wülker, until 1884 surname spelled as Wülcker was a German Anglist. He studied German and English philology at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, and following military service in the Franco-Prussian War, he continued his education at the University of Marburg. In 1873 he obtained his habilitation for English philology at the University of Leipzig, where he later taught classes as an associate professor of English language and literature , then served as a full professor from 1880 to 1910.
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Tache Papahagi
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Tache Papahagi was an Aromanian folklorist and linguist. He was born into an Aromanian family in Avdella , a village that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet and is now in Greece. He attended primary school in his native village, followed from 1902 to 1912 by studies at the Romanian high schools in Ioannina and Bitola. From 1912 to 1916, he went to the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest in Romania. In 1925, he obtained a doctorate in philology from the same institution; his thesis dealt with the Maramureș dialect and folklore. He was a high school teacher at Târgu Neamț from 1916 to 1918.
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Richard Theodore Greener
1844 - 1922 (78 years)
Richard Theodore Greener was a pioneering African-American scholar, excelling in elocution, philosophy, law and classics in the Reconstruction era. He broke ground as Harvard College's first Black graduate in 1870. Within three years, he had also graduated from law school at the University of South Carolina, only to also be hired as its first Black professor, after briefly serving as associate editor for the New National Era, a newspaper owned and edited by Frederick Douglass.
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Edwin Fischer
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Edwin Fischer was a Swiss classical pianist and conductor. He is regarded as one of the great interpreters of J.S. Bach and Mozart in the twentieth century. Biography Fischer was born in Basel and studied music first there with Hans Huber, and later in Berlin at the Stern conservatory under Martin Krause. He first came to prominence as a pianist following World War I. In 1926, he became conductor of the Lübeck Musikverein and later conducted in Munich. In 1932, he formed his own chamber orchestra, and was one of the first to be interested in presenting music of the Baroque and Classical periods in a historically accurate way.
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Alan Freed
1921 - 1965 (44 years)
Albert James "Alan" Freed was an American disc jockey. He also produced and promoted large traveling concerts with various acts, helping to spread the importance of rock and roll music throughout North America.
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Francesco Geminiani
1687 - 1762 (75 years)
Francesco Xaverio Geminiani was an Italian violinist, composer, and music theorist. BBC Radio 3 once described him as "now largely forgotten, but in his time considered almost a musical god, deemed to be the equal of Handel and Corelli."
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Jacob Alting
1618 - 1679 (61 years)
Jacob Alting studied in Groningen and was ordained as a Church of England priest. He was named professor of theology at Groningen University in 1667 after holding the chair of oriental languages since 1641. His publications were overseen in 1687 by Balthasar Bekker, and argued with Maresius on biblical exegesis when the latter accused him of heterodoxy .
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Vince Guaraldi
1928 - 1976 (48 years)
Vincent Anthony Guaraldi was an American jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated television adaptations of the Peanuts comic strip. His compositions for this series included their signature melody "Linus and Lucy" and the holiday standard "Christmas Time Is Here". He is also known for his performances on piano as a member of Cal Tjader's 1950s ensembles and for his own solo career. His 1962 composition "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" became a radio hit and won a Grammy Award in 1963 for Best Original Jazz Composition. He died of a sudden heart attack on February 6, 1976, at age ...
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Pearl Bailey
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Pearl Mae Bailey was an American actress, singer and author. After appearing in vaudeville, she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946. She received a Special Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly! in 1968. In 1986, she won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance as a fairy godmother in the ABC Afterschool Special Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale. Her rendition of "Takes Two to Tango" hit the top ten in 1952.
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Ludwig Tobler
1827 - 1895 (68 years)
Johann Ludwig Tobler was a Swiss philologist and folklorist. Born in Hirzel in Zürich, Switzerland, he was an older brother of philologist Adolf Tobler . Ludwig Tobler died in Zürich. He studied theology, philosophy and philology at the universities of Zürich and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate at the latter institution in 1851. In 1864 he obtained his habilitation from the University of Bern and in 1866 became an associate professor of linguistics and German philology. In 1873 he returned to the University of Zürich, where in 1893 he was named a full professor of German language and literat...
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William Henry Reed
1876 - 1942 (66 years)
William Henry Reed MVO was an English violinist, teacher, composer, conductor and biographer of Sir Edward Elgar. He was leader of the London Symphony Orchestra for 23 years , but is best known for his long personal friendship with Elgar and his book Elgar As I Knew Him , in which he goes into great detail about the genesis of the Violin Concerto in B minor.
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Tito Gobbi
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
Tito Gobbi was an Italian operatic baritone with an international reputation. He made his operatic debut in Gubbio in 1935 as Count Rodolfo in Bellini's La sonnambula and quickly appeared in Italy's major opera houses. By the time he retired in 1979 he had acquired a repertoire of almost 100 operatic roles. They ranged from Mozart's mid-range baritone roles through Rossini's Barber through Donizetti and the standard Verdi and Puccini baritone roles to Alban Berg's Wozzeck. He had a worldwide career as operatic baritone, appearing in for over 25 films and, from the mid-1960s onward, was the s...
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Howard Hanson
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Howard Harold Hanson was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and champion of American classical music. As director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a high-quality school and provided opportunities for commissioning and performing American music. In 1944, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 4, and received numerous other awards including the George Foster Peabody Award for Outstanding Entertainment in Music in 1946.
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Frederick Lonsdale
1881 - 1954 (73 years)
Frederick Lonsdale was a British playwright known for his librettos to several successful musicals early in the 20th century, including King of Cadonia , The Balkan Princess , Betty , The Maid of the Mountains , Monsieur Beaucaire and Madame Pompadour . He also wrote comedy plays, including The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and On Approval and the murder melodrama But for the Grace of God . Some of his plays and musicals were made into films, and he also wrote a few screenplays.
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Maurice Chevalier
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Maurice Auguste Chevalier was a French singer, actor, and entertainer. He is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including "Livin' In The Sunlight", "Valentine", "Louise", "Mimi", and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", and for his films, including The Love Parade, The Big Pond, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, and Love Me Tonight. His trademark attire was a boater hat and tuxedo.
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Vivian Vance
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Vivian Vance was an American actress best known for playing Ethel Mertz on the sitcom I Love Lucy , for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress, among other accolades. She also starred alongside Lucille Ball in The Lucy Show from 1962 until she left the series at the end of its third season in 1965. In 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is most commonly identified as Lucille Ball’s longtime comedic foil from 1951 until her death in 1979.
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César Chesneau Dumarsais
1676 - 1756 (80 years)
César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais or Du Marsais was a French philosophe, grammarian and contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. He was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and contributed to Diderot's Encyclopédie. After his death, Jacques-Philippe-Augustin Douchet and Nicolas Beauzée, who were both teachers at the École royale militaire, took over his work.
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Sammy Fain
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Sammy Fain was an American composer of popular music. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he contributed numerous songs that form part of The Great American Songbook, and to Broadway theatre. Fain was also a popular musician and vocalist.
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A. E. Meeussen
1912 - 1978 (66 years)
Achille Emile Meeussen, also spelled Achiel Emiel Meeussen, or simply A.E. Meeussen was a distinguished Belgian specialist in Bantu languages, particularly those of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Together with the British scholar Malcolm Guthrie he is regarded as one of the two leading experts in Bantu languages in the second half of the 20th century.
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Vsevolod Pudovkin
1893 - 1953 (60 years)
Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin was a Soviet film director, screenwriter and actor who developed influential theories of montage. Pudovkin's masterpieces are often contrasted with those of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, but whereas Eisenstein utilized montage to glorify the power of the masses, Pudovkin preferred to concentrate on the courage and resilience of individuals. He was granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR in 1948.
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Big Bill Broonzy
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Big Bill Broonzy was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country music to mostly African-American audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, he navigated a change in style to a more urban blues sound popular with working-class black audiences. In the 1950s, a return to his traditional folk-blues roots made him one of the leading figures of the emerging American folk music revival and an international star. His long and varied career marks him as one of the key figures in the development of blues music in the 20th century.
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Morita Sōhei
1881 - 1949 (68 years)
Morita Yonematsu , known under pen name Morita Sōhei , was a novelist and translator of Western literature active during the late Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. Early life Morita was born into a farming family what is now Gifu, Gifu Prefecture. At the age of 15, he was selected for the Imperial Japanese Navy's preparatory course, and sent to boarding school in Tokyo. He managed to avoid conscription into the military, and attended what is now Kanazawa University, where he met his future wife, and then went on to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to Gifu, but...
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Rutland Boughton
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Rutland Boughton was an English composer who became well known in the early 20th century as a composer of opera and choral music. He was also an influential communist activist within the Communist Party of Great Britain .
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Boris Unbegaun
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Boris Ottokar Unbegaun was a Russian-born German linguist and philologist, expert in Slavic studies: Slavic languages and literature. He worked in universities of France, Great Britain and the United States.
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Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov
1665 - 1731 (66 years)
Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov was a Russian writer, translator, and printer. He is most noted for his Slavonic Bukvar that was widely used by Slavic-speakers both in Europe and throughout the Russian Empire. The historic significance of the 1701 Primer as a sample of book-printing trade lies in the fact that it was the first time in the history of Moscow book-printing that it was attempted to teach students the elements of not only one language but of three at the same time: Slavic, Greek and Latin.
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William Alwyn
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
William Alwyn , was an English composer, conductor, and music teacher. Life and music William Alwyn was born William Alwyn Smith in Northampton, the son of Ada Tyler and William James Smith. He showed an early interest in music and began to learn to play the piccolo. At the age of 15 he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London where he studied flute and composition. He was a virtuoso flautist and for a time was a flautist with the London Symphony Orchestra. Alwyn served as professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1926 to 1955.
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Carl Marstrander
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Carl Johan Sverdrup Marstrander was a Norwegian linguist, known for his work on the Irish language. His works, largely written in Norwegian, on the Celtic and Norse components in Norwegian culture, are considered important for modern Norway.
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Kirsten Flagstad
1895 - 1962 (67 years)
Kirsten Malfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer, who was the outstanding Wagnerian soprano of her era. Her triumphant debut in New York on 2 February 1935 is one of the legends of opera. Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the longstanding General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera said, “I have given America two great gifts — Caruso and Flagstad.”
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Jill Ireland
1936 - 1990 (54 years)
Jill Dorothy Ireland was an English actress and singer. She appeared in 16 films with husband Charles Bronson, and was involved in two of Bronson’s other films as a producer. Early life Born in Hounslow, Ireland was the daughter of a wine importer.
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Moritz Moszkowski
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Moritz Moszkowski was a German composer, pianist, and teacher of Polish-Jewish descent. His brother Alexander Moszkowski was a famous writer and satirist in Berlin. Ignacy Paderewski said: "After Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique." Although less known today, Moszkowski was well respected and popular during the late nineteenth century.
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Wakamatsu Shizuko
1864 - 1896 (32 years)
Wakamatsu Shizuko was a Japanese educator, translator, and novelist best known for translating Little Lord Fauntleroy written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She is also known for introducing literature with Christianity for children's novels.
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Barbu Solacolu
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Barbu Solacolu was a Romanian poet, translator, civil servant and social scientist. Born into a prosperous and intellectual family, he became a late affiliate of the Symbolist movement, bringing to it his own leftist sympathies and agrarianism. Despite spending the early stages of World War I among non-interventionists such as Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești and Ioan Slavici, he eventually servd with distinctions as a cavalry commander, and also participated in the Hungarian–Romanian War. Solacolu trained as an economist in Weimar Germany, returning to serve the Romanian state as a civil servant. He...
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