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Mitchison, Naomi

(Encyclopedia)Mitchison, Naomi, 1897–1999, British writer, b. Scotland, educated at Oxford; daughter of the biologist J. S. Haldane. She wrote many types of novels on a variety of subjects. They include historica...

Graupner, Christoph

(Encyclopedia)Graupner, Christoph krĭsˈtôf groupˈnər [key], 1693–1760, German composer, studied at Leipzig with Johann Heinichen and Johann Kuhnau. After playing harpsichord at the Hamburg opera (1706–9) u...

Buxtehude, Dietrich

(Encyclopedia)Buxtehude, Dietrich dēˈtrĭkh bo͝oksˌtəho͞oˈdə [key], c.1637–1707, Danish composer and organist. From 1668 until his death he was organist at Lübeck, where he established a famous series of...

chaconne and passacaglia

(Encyclopedia)chaconne päˌsəkälˈyə [key], two closely related musical forms popular during the baroque period. Both are in triple meter time and employ a characteristic recurring harmonic pattern or actual ba...

Sebald, W. G.

(Encyclopedia)Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald), 1944–2001, German novelist, grad. Freiburg Univ. (1965). Sebald's novels are dense, elegiac, and meditative. They mingle fiction with history and th...

Hurston, Zora Neale

(Encyclopedia)Hurston, Zora Neale, 1891?–60, African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., and graduated from Barnard College, where she studied with ...

Hammerstein, Oscar, 2d

(Encyclopedia)Hammerstein, Oscar, 2d, 1895–1960, American lyricist and librettist, b. New York City, grad. Columbia, 1916; grandson of Oscar Hammerstein. His first success was Wildflower (1923), with music by Vin...

Anthropocene

(Encyclopedia)Anthropocene Epoch, an unofficial term used by scientists to describe a period of time—up to the present—in which humanity has impacted the planet on a global scale. The phrase was fir...

Luce, Clare Boothe

(Encyclopedia)Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903–87, American playwright and diplomat, whose name originally was Anne Clare Boothe, b. New York City. Witty, outspoken, glamorous, and an articulate political conservative, L...

Sassoon, Siegfried

(Encyclopedia)Sassoon, Siegfried, 1886–1967, English poet and novelist. A heroic and decorated officer in World War I, he nonetheless expressed his conviction of the brutality and waste of war in grim, forceful, ...