Wangari Muta Maathai, Conservationist and Nobel Peace Prize Winner

In 2004, Wangari Muta Maathai became the first African Woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai is known as the founder of the...

Leonardo da Vinci, Painter, Scientist and Thinker

Leonardo da Vinci will forever be known for “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa.” But there was more to the man than his art....

Willie Nelson, Country Music Sensation

Willie Nelson, country singer-songwriter, long-haired hippie and philanthropist, has had a prolific music career. He began playing when he was 10 years old and...

Rainer Maria Rilke, Author of “Letters to a Young Poet”

Rainer Maria Rilke spent his life traveling the globe. Despite a variety of lovers and locales—Prague, Munich, Rome, Paris and Switzerland—Rilke remained alone, seeking...

William Faulkner, American Novelist

William Faulkner, revered modernist writer, historian and sociologist, is known for capturing the raw beauty of the rural South in all its dark complexity....

Saul Bellow, American Novelist

“The backbone of 20th-century American literature”—this was novelist Philip Roth’s assessment of Saul Bellow. His struggle with modernism, his Jewish upbringing, his feelings of...

Niccolò Paganini, Violinist and Composer

Playing with a skill so dazzling and in so eerie a manner that it was seen as supernatural, violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini is...

Chiune Sugihara, the “Japanese Schindler”

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese consul during World War II who helped save the lives of thousands of Polish Jewish refugees by signing visas...

Roger Federer, Record-Breaking Tennis Player

Roger Federer is leading men’s tennis into a new generation of high intensity, skillful play. But this emotional phenom has had to overcome heartache,...

Federico García Lorca, Spanish Poet and Playwright

Before the Spanish Civil War, scholars, literary figures and artists from all of Europe found a home in Spain, a nation of contrasts, diverse...