Notable : Book Collection : Culture Collection

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (November 1, 1917 - June 13, 2002) was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
He was the Neil Gray Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he taught from 1959 until his retirement in 1988; from 1966 to 1972, he was master of Yale's Calhoun College. From 1954 to 1959 he taught at Rutgers–Newark. In 1988 Lewis received a Litt.D. from Bates College. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lewis received its Gold Medal for Biography in 2000.
Lewis is generally considered one of the founders of the academic field of American Studies. His interests ranged from criticism of American and European writers to biography and artistic criticism. He is associated with John William Ward.
Lewis' career as critic involved him in the lives of many influential American and European thinkers and writers.
Lewis received his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Norman Maclean, author of the novel A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. He and his wife and sometime co-author Nancy later became close friends with Southern writer Robert Penn Warren.
Lewis' first major work The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955) explored De Crèvecoeur's idea of the American as a "new man" - an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Lewis portrayed this preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind that shaped the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. The book traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James and others, and in his epilogue Lewis exposes its continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

Salvatore Fiume (23 October 1915 – 3 June 1997) was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, writer and stage designer. His works are kept in some of the most important museums in the world, among which the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, the Museum of Modern Art of New York City, the Pushkin Museum of Moscow and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Milan.

Marcel François Paul Landowski (18 February 1915 – 23 December 1999) was a French composer, biographer and arts administrator.

Wolfgang Windgassen (26 June 1914 – 8 September 1974) was a German heldentenor internationally known for his performances in Wagner operas.

Eleanor Clark (1913 – 1996) was an American writer and "master stylist," best known for her non-fiction accounts.

Roger Caillois (French: [ʁɔʒe kajwa]; 3 March 1913 – 21 December 1978) was a French intellectual whose idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, ludology and philosophy by focusing on diverse subjects such as games and play as well as the sacred. He was also instrumental in introducing Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Ángel Asturias to the French public. After his death, the French Literary award Prix Roger Caillois was named after him in 1991.

Vido William Musso (January 16, 1913 – January 9, 1982) was an American jazz saxophonist.

Roberto Lardera (December 18, 1911 – February 23, 1989), informally known as Berto Lardera, was an Italian sculptor of the 20th century. He was born in La Spezia, Italy, the son of a naval engineer. He was self-taught and his leanings towards monumental, metallic sculptures may have been influenced by the sights he grew up with in the naval dockyards.
In 1947 Lardera moved to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1989. He exhibited at the Galerie Denise René and then at the Salon de Mai and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Lardera's sculpture began with abstract metal structures based on two dimensions, or a flat geometrical plane, which challenged the conventional form of sculpture based around volume and enclosed spaces. Later his work became more diverse, with his geometrical constructions branching out into the horizontal as well as the vertical plane and often resulting in series based on a single theme, such as his Miracles, Aubes and Archanges series.
His sculptures are to be found the world over, in Europe, America and Japan. They show the use of a wide range of different metals, as well as different dimensions. Lardera did not produce very many prints, but his interest in using different planes and dimensions led to him making markedly "sculptural" prints. He used a unique technique, cutting forms and designs with his sculpting tools in thick iron plates from which the prints were pulled. He used no acid or chemical processes.