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Degas, Edgar

(Encyclopedia)Degas, Edgar (Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas) ēlĕrˈ zhĕrmăNˈ ĕdgärˈ dəgäˈ [key], 1834–1917, French painter and sculptor, b. Paris; son of a banker. Although prepared for the law, he abandon...

reading, mental process

(Encyclopedia)reading, process of mentally interpreting written symbols. Facility in reading is an essential factor in educational progress, and instruction in this basic skill is a primary purpose of elementary ed...

Spark, Dame Muriel

(Encyclopedia)Spark, Dame Muriel, 1918–2006, Scottish novelist, b. Muriel Sarah Camberg. She lived in Edinburgh, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), London, New York, and Rome, and spent her last years in Tuscany. Spark's t...

Lloyd, Harold

(Encyclopedia)Lloyd, Harold, 1893–1971, American movie actor. Born in tiny Burchard, Kans., he came to California in 1912. Lloyd became famous for his comic portrayals of a wistful innocent with horn-rimmed glass...

Knight, Bobby

(Encyclopedia)Knight, Bobby (Robert Montgomery Knight), 1940–, American basketball coach, b. Massillon, Ohio. A point guard at Ohio State (grad. 1962), Knight became (1963) an assistant coach at West Point and tw...

Auerbach, Erich

(Encyclopedia)Auerbach, Erich, 1892–1957, German-American philologist, literary scholar, and critic, b. Berlin, Ph.D. Univ. of Greifswald, 1921. He is known primarily for Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in...

Gardiner, Sir John Eliot

(Encyclopedia)Gardiner, Sir John Eliot, 1943–, English conductor, studied King's College, Cambridge, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Known particularly for performances of baroque music on period instruments, ...

Alsop, Joseph

(Encyclopedia)Alsop, Joseph ôlˈsəp [key], 1910–89, and Alsop, Stewart, 1914–74, American political journalists, b. Avon, Conn. Joseph joined (1932) the New York Herald Tribune as a staff reporter and moved (...

Du Pont, Pierre Samuel

(Encyclopedia)Du Pont, Pierre Samuel, 1870–1954, American industrialist, b. Wilmington, Del., grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1890. Du Pont worked as a chemist with the family's company, helping to d...

creole language

(Encyclopedia)creole language krēōlˈ [key], any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues. Examples are the Gullah o...