Thinkers Timeline

T.S. Eliot was a poet and critic. His full name was Thomas Stearns Eliot. He is seen as one of the most important poets in English of the twentieth century. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, in the United States. He died in 1965 in London. Eliot came from a well-off American family. He studied at Harvard University and then in Europe. As a young man he settled in England, and he later became a British citizen. He spent the rest of his life there. Eliot did not begin as a full-time writer. For years he worked at a bank in London, writing poetry in his spare time. Later he became an editor at a publishing house, where he helped many other writers. His most famous poem is 'The Waste Land', published in 1922. It is a difficult, broken poem about a damaged world after the First World War. It made him famous. Later he wrote 'Four Quartets', a long, calmer poem about time and faith. Eliot also wrote important essays about poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first marriage was very unhappy and painful for both people. In his later years he found more peace, partly through his religious faith and a happy second marriage.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was an Austrian-American writer and teacher whose books and articles over seven decades shaped the practice of management and helped establish it as a distinct field of study. He was born in Vienna in 1909 to an educated middle-class family — his father a senior civil servant, his mother one of the first women to study medicine in Austria. The Drucker home was a meeting place for intellectuals, and the young Peter grew up among people like the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He studied law in Hamburg and Frankfurt, earned a doctorate in international law in 1931, and worked briefly as a financial journalist. The rise of Nazism drove him out of Germany in 1933; he moved first to London, then in 1937 to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1939 book The End of Economic Man analysed the rise of fascism. In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years studying the company, producing Concept of the Corporation in 1946, one of the first serious studies of how a large modern business actually works. Over the following decades he wrote thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles covering management, innovation, the non-profit sector, economics, and the rise of the knowledge worker. He taught at New York University and for most of his later career at the Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its management school after him. He advised corporations, governments, non-profits, and religious organisations. He died in Claremont in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist. He was born in Harlem, New York, the eldest of nine children. His mother's partner, David Baldwin, a storefront preacher, was a powerful and terrifying figure in his childhood, and the tensions between religious passion and the world's brutality run through all of Baldwin's work. He grew up in poverty in Harlem during the Depression, was a gifted student who discovered books and libraries as a way out of the world around him, and became a junior preacher at fourteen. By seventeen he had left the church, though its language and rhythms never left his writing. In 1948, at twenty-four, he left the United States for Paris, driven away by the daily humiliations and the constant threat of racial violence. He spent much of his adult life in France but never stopped writing about and returning to America. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953, and was followed by Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, among others. His essay collections — Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street — are among the most important works of American prose in the twentieth century. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France in 1987.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was an American poet, memoirist, essayist, and public figure whose seven-volume autobiography and body of poetry made her one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century. She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St Louis, Missouri. After her parents' marriage ended, she and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. At seven, during a visit to her mother, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend; after testifying against him, she stopped speaking for nearly five years. She returned to Stamps and, under the patient attention of a neighbour who introduced her to literature, gradually found her voice again. She left school at sixteen, became San Francisco's first Black streetcar conductor, and gave birth to her son Guy that same year. Over the following decades she worked as a singer, dancer, actor, journalist, activist, and eventually writer. She lived in Ghana in the 1960s and worked closely with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr in the American civil rights movement. In 1969 she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume of her autobiography, which became one of the most widely taught books in American schools and has been translated into many languages. She published six further autobiographical volumes, ten books of poetry, essays, plays, and children's books. She recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, the first inaugural poem in over thirty years. She taught for decades at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and died there in 2014, aged eighty-six.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She is one of the most important writers of science fiction and fantasy in any language. She was born on 21 October 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were unusual. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, was a famous anthropologist who had studied the native peoples of California. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, was a writer who later produced Ishi in Two Worlds, a book about the last survivor of a California tribe. Their home was full of books, Indigenous friends, and long conversations about other cultures. This upbringing shaped everything Le Guin later wrote. She studied at Radcliffe College and at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in French and Italian Renaissance literature. In 1953, travelling by ship to France on a Fulbright scholarship, she met the historian Charles Le Guin. They married and eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, where they raised three children. She lived in Portland for most of her life. She began publishing fiction in the early 1960s. Her breakthrough came with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a fantasy novel about a young wizard. It has never gone out of print. The following year, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagined a world where people are neither male nor female most of the time. The Dispossessed (1974) imagined an anarchist society on a moon, seen in dialogue with a capitalist society on the planet it orbits. These three books alone would have made her a major writer. She wrote more than twenty novels, many stories, essays, and poems over six decades. She also translated. Her English version of the Daodejing, the ancient Chinese Daoist text, was published in 1997 and is one of the most admired. She died on 22 January 2018 in Portland, aged 88. She had been writing almost until the end.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, into a Black working-class family with deep roots in African American storytelling traditions. She studied at Howard University and Cornell, and worked for many years as an editor at Random House, where she championed and shaped major works of African American literature. She began writing fiction in her thirties, while raising two children alone after her marriage ended. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She went on to write ten novels in all, each one formally adventurous and morally demanding. Beloved (1987), her most celebrated work, is based on the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Song of Solomon, Sula, Jazz, and Paradise each explore different dimensions of Black American life and history with extraordinary formal invention. She also wrote important critical essays, most notably Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which examined how African American presence had shaped and was systematically ignored in American literature. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She died in 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Vine Deloria Jr. was a Native American scholar, writer, and activist. He was the most influential Native American intellectual of the 20th century. His books changed how Native Americans were studied in universities and how Native communities thought about themselves. He was born in 1933 in Martin, South Dakota. He came from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The Sioux are also known by their own names, including Lakota and Dakota. His family had a long history of leadership. His grandfather was a Yankton Sioux man named Tipi Sapa. His father, Vine Deloria Sr., was an Episcopal priest, one of the first Native American priests in that church. His aunt was the writer and historian Ella Deloria. The family combined deep involvement in the Christian church with deep loyalty to Sioux traditions. The combination shaped Vine Jr.'s thinking. He studied at Iowa State University and then at the Lutheran School of Theology in Illinois. He earned a master's degree in theology in 1963. He also earned a law degree in 1970. He served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967, the major political organisation for Native nations. His first book, Custer Died for Your Sins, came out in 1969. It was an angry, funny, wide-ranging attack on how white America treated Native Americans. It became a major bestseller. He went on to write more than 20 books on law, religion, science, and history. He taught at several universities, ending at the University of Colorado. He died of cancer in 2005, aged 72. His son Philip Deloria is also a leading scholar.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist whose work insisted on the interconnection of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the analysis of power. She was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City to parents who had emigrated from Grenada in the Caribbean. She dropped the y from her name as a child, preferring the symmetry of Audre Lorde. She grew up in Harlem during the Depression, attended Hunter College and Columbia University, and worked as a librarian while beginning to publish her poetry. Her first book of poems appeared in 1968. She went on to publish ten further poetry collections, three prose books including the autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and a large body of essays and speeches gathered in Sister Outsider and other volumes. She taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and later held a long professorship in English at Hunter College in New York. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and wrote The Cancer Journals, one of the first serious public accounts of the experience. She lived for a period in the Caribbean island of St Croix, where she continued her writing and political organising. She died of liver cancer in 1992, aged fifty-eight. She described herself, in a phrase that became famous, as a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet — refusing to be reduced to any single part of that identity.

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic, public intellectual, and music critic. He was one of the founders of postcolonial studies. He was born on 1 November 1935 in Jerusalem, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. His family was Palestinian Christian. His father was a successful businessman with American citizenship. The family lived between Jerusalem and Cairo. In 1948, the State of Israel was created and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced. Said's family lost their home in Jerusalem. He was 12. The family settled in Cairo, where he attended British and American schools. At 15, he was sent to boarding school in the United States. He studied at Princeton and then at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in English literature in 1964. He taught at Columbia University in New York for most of his career, from 1963 until his death. His early work was on European literature, especially Joseph Conrad. In 1978 he published Orientalism, the book that changed his life and founded a new field of study. It argued that Western scholarship about the Middle East had created a false and damaging image of the region. He was also a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights. He served for fourteen years on the Palestinian National Council. He wrote about music as a critic and was an accomplished pianist. With the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, he co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings young Arab and Israeli musicians together. He died of leukaemia on 25 September 2003 in New York, aged 67.

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and writer. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote about politics, literature, religion, and many other subjects. He was known for sharp arguments, beautiful prose, and a willingness to take unpopular positions. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. He came from a middle-class British military family. His father was a navy officer. His mother was Jewish, though he only learned this as an adult. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford from 1967. He was active in left-wing student politics. After university he became a journalist. He wrote for left-wing magazines including the New Statesman. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He wrote a regular column for The Nation, a major American left-wing magazine, for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen in 2007. He wrote for many other publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was prolific. He wrote 17 books and thousands of articles. For most of his career, he was on the political left. He was a friend of writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, his politics shifted. He supported the Iraq war in 2003. Many of his old left-wing friends saw this as betrayal. He defended his position fiercely. In 2007 he published God Is Not Great, an aggressive attack on religion. The book made him one of the New Atheists alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He continued writing about his illness with extraordinary honesty. He died in December 2011, aged 62.