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Born January 24, 1862, in New York, Edith Wharton was educated in both America and Europe. In 1885, after marriage, she moved to France, and in 1899 published her first work, a collection of stories. Subsequently she wrote many other works, including her famous novels The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920). In 1916 she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’honneur for her work in helping refugees in ...

Born on Long Island in 1819, Walt Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. The work of his lifetime was a collection of his poems called Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 with his own money and revised often over the following decades. In it he sought to reach the common reader with an American epic. He spent the last years of his life crippled and poor, living in near squalor in Camden, New Jersey. ...

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was the 28th President of the United States. Born in Virginia, he pursued an academic career, turning to politics after he became head of Princeton University. He was elected to the presidency in 1912 and was thereafter responsible for a great many progressive reform measures. His championship of the League of Nations after World War I foundered on domestic politics, and for the remainder of his second term he became ill and virtually incapacitated in the White ...