Traits : Personality : Solitary/ Introvert

Gerrit Achterberg (20 May 1905 – 17 January 1962) was a Dutch poet. His early poetry concerned a desire to be united with a beloved in death.
Achterberg was born in Nederlangbroek in the Netherlands as the third son of a family of eight children. He was raised as a Protestant within the Calvinist tradition. His father was a coachman until the automobile gained popularity. Achterberg was a very good student, and in 1924 he embarked on a career as a teacher. In the same year, he made his literary debut together with Arie Dekkers, who had encouraged him to write, together publishing De Zangen van Twee Twintigers (English: The Songs of Two Twenty-Somethings).
Meanwhile, Achterberg became more withdrawn and introverted. After he was turned down by the military due to "sickness of the soul", he threatened to kill himself.
Achterberg's literary career began to take off when Roel Houwink presented himself as his mentor. Achterberg published his collection "Afvaart" in 1931, in which his famous theme, of a love irrevocably lost, was already strongly present. After the publication of "Afvaart", Achterberg suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to a psychiatric institution several times. His mental instability caused occasional violent outbursts.
These eruptions of violence escalated in 1937. At that time, Achterberg was living in Utrecht and was again engaged to be married. On 15 December 1937 he tried to force himself on Bep van Es, the 16-year-old daughter of his landlady. When the latter tried to stop him, he shot and killed her, and wounded her daughter. After the shooting, he turned himself in and was sentenced to involuntary commitment. He was committed until 1943. During this commitment and the period following (between 1939 and 1953), he published 22 collections of poetry.
In 1946 he married his childhood friend Cathrien van Baak, with whom he lived in Leusden until he died from a heart attack in 1962.In 1959, Achterberg received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire body of work.
Achterberg's most famous work is the Ballad Reiziger doet Golgotha (A Tourist Does Golgotha) and the sonnet sequence Ballade van de gasfitter (1953;Ballad of the gasfitter). J.M. Coetzee included this sonnet sequence in an anthology of his English translations of Dutch poetry entitled Landscape with Rowers (2004). Earlier in his career, Coetzee also wrote an essay on this sonnet sequence, titled: 'Achterberg's "Ballade van de gasfitter": The Mystery of I and You' (1977),

William Fisk Harrah (September 2, 1911 – June 30, 1978) was an American businessman and the founder of Harrah's Hotel and Casinos, now part of Caesars Entertainment.

Carlos Castañeda (December 25, 1925 – April 27, 1998) was an American writer. Starting in 1968, Castaneda published a series of books that describe a training in shamanism that he received under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named don Juan Matus. While Castaneda's work was accepted as factual by many when the books were first published, the training he described is now generally considered to be fictional.The first three books—The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan—were written while he was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Castaneda was awarded his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles based on the work he described in these books.At the time of his death in 1998, Castaneda's books had sold more than eight million copies and had been published in 17 languages.