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Shearing was born in 1919 in the Battersea area of London. Congenitally blind, he was the youngest of nine children. His father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains at night after caring for the children during the day. His only formal musical education consisted of four years of study at the Linden Lodge School for the Blind. While his talent won him a number of university scholarships, he was forced to refuse them in favor of a more financially productive pursuit playing piano in a neighborhood pub for the handsome salary of $5 a week! Shearing joined an all-blind band in the 1930's. At that time he developed a friendship with the noted jazz critic and author, Leonard Feather. Through this contact, he made his first appearance on BBC radio. In 1947, Mr. Shearing moved to America, where he spent two years establishing his fame on this side of the Atlantic. The Shearing Sound commanded national attention when, in 1949, he gathered a quintet to record *September in the Rain* for MGM. The record was an overnight success and sold 900,000 copies. His U.S. reputation was permanently established when he was booked into Birdland, the legendary jazz spot in New York. Since then, he has become one of the country's most popular performing and recording artist. In 1982 and 1983 he won Grammy Awards with recordings he made with Mel Torme. Mr. Shearing was the subject of an hour-long television documentary entitled The Shearing Touch presented on the Southbank Show with Melvyn Bragg on ITV in the UK. Three presidents have invited Mr. Shearing to play at the White House.. Ford, Carter and Reagan. He performed at the Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. He is a member of the Friars Club and the Lotos Club in New York and the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. His awards and honors are many. In May 1975, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Music from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. In May of 1994, Hamilton College in upstate New York awarded him another honorary doctorate in music. DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana presented him with an honorary doctorate of music on June 1, 2002. He received the prestigious Horatio Alger Award for Distinguished Americans in 1978 and a community recreational facility in Battersea, south London, was named the George Shearing Centre in his honor. In May of 1993, he was presented with the British equivalent of the Grammy, the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement. In June of 1996, Mr. Shearing was included in the Queen's Birthday Honors List and on November 26, 1996 he was invested by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service to music and Anglo-US relations. He was presented the first American Music Award by the National Arts Club, New York City, in March of 1998. Mr. Shearing's biography, *Lullaby of Birdland*, published by Continuum, was released February 2005. In conjunction with the autobiography release Concord Records released a composite of Shearing recordings in a 2-CD set entitled *Lullabies of Birdland.: A Musical Autobiography* which was immediately followed up with *Hopeless Romantics* with Michael Feinstein. Concord then released the collectors set Mel Torme & George Shearing *The Concord Years*. Mr. Shearing's popularity continues to rise.

Richard Tucker is today primarily associated with the history of opera in America- a highly gifted tenor, he is compared to Franco Corelli in influence and appeal, and classed with people like Alfredo Kraus and Nicolai Gedda. But Tucker, as a Jewish American who came to music from a religious background, had an output different from all of those others, and, ironically, was just as well known in the United States- and perhaps even more beloved- for that other side of his work. He was born in New York, and at age six joined the choir of an Orthodox Jewish synogogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a boy alto. Over the next eight years, he sang at weddings and other events and became steeped in Jewish liturgy and the musical traditions of the synogogue -- only the inevitable change to his voice interrupted his vocalizing, and from ages 14 through 18 he abandoned singing. By the time he reached 18, however, his adult voice had settled into a rich tenor, and it was in that capacity that he returned to his old synogogue. Eventually, Tucker sang around the world, his debut in Italy coming in the same production in which Maria Callas made her debut; he sang at Covent Garden in 1957, and in Vienna in 1958, and at La Scala in Milan in 1969. Tucker remained uniquely popular in America, however, and even more so in New York. He passed away in 1975 at age 61. His funeral service was held on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and in his memory the Richard Tucker Foundation awards a prize each year to a promising potential.

Eric Bentley is a renowned critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. He became an American citizen in 1948, and currently lives in New York City. In 1998 he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame; he is also a member of the New York Theater Hall of Fame, in recognition of his years of performances in cabarets. In addition to teaching at Columbia University from 1953, Bentley was in the a theatre critic for The New Republic, known for his blunt style of theatre criticism. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller threatened to sue Bentley for his unfavorable reviews of their work, but abandoned the attempt. From 1960-1961, Bentley was the Norton professor at Harvard University. Bentley met Bertolt Brecht at UCLA as a young man and is considered one of the pre-eminent experts on Brecht, whose work he has translated. He edited the Grove Press issue of Brecht's work, and made two albums of Brecht songs for the legendary Folkways Records label, most of which had never been recorded in English before. In 1969, Bentley came out of the closet and declared his homosexuality. In an interview in the New York Times on 12 November 2006, he says he was married twice before coming out at age 53, and deciding, at the same time, to leave his post at Columbia to concentrate on his writing. He has stated his being gay as an influence on his theater work, especially his play Lord Alfred's Lover. He has written many critical books, including *A Century of Hero-Worship*, *The Playwright as Thinker*, *Bernard Shaw*, *What is Theatre?*, *The Life of the Drama*, *Theatre of War*, *Brecht Commentaries*, and *Thinking about the Playwright*. His most-produced play, *Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been*, published in 1972, was based on the transcripts collected in Thirty Years of treason.

The celebrated and communicative English-born American conductor, Leopold Stokowski, was born into a Polish and Irish mother, but was raised as an Englishman. His famous, vaguely foreign, accent somehow appeared later in his life. The young Stokowski was a precocious musician, and as a child learned to play the violin, piano, and organ with apparently little effort. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest person to have been admitted to the Royal College of Music. By eighteen, Leopold Stokowski had been appointed organist and choirmaster at St. James', Piccadilly. He attended Queen's College, Oxford, receiving a Bachelor of Music degree in 1903. He moved to the USA in 1905, but returned to Europe each summer for further musical studies in Berlin, Munich, and Paris. When a conductor fell ill in Paris in 1908, he made his debut as an emergency substitute. The impression he made led to a position with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in which he quickly achieved notable success. However, a more tempting prospect faced him when he was asked to take over the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912. It was during his long and fruitful association with this ensemble that Stokowski established himself as one of the leading musicians of his day. Following his tenure in Philadelphia, Leopold Stokowski directed several other ensembles, including the All-American Youth Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and the American Symphony Orchestra, which he organized in 1962. He continued to make concert appearances and studio recordings of both standard works and unusual repertoire well into his nineties. He made his last public appearance as conductor in Venice in 1975, remaining active in the recording studio through 1977.

As NPR's senior national correspondent, Linda Wertheimer travels the country and the globe for NPR News, bringing her unique insights and wealth of experience to bear on the day's top news stories. Wertheimer provides analysis and thoughtful reporting on all NPR News programs. Before taking the senior national correspondent post, Wertheimer spent 13 years as a host of NPR's flagship news magazine, *All Things Considered.*

Nathaniel Philbrick is an American author and a winner of the National Book Award for his work of maritime history, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. He has written extensively about sailing. His works include The Passionate Sailor and Second Wind: A Sailfish Sailor's Odyssey. Philbrick is also the editor of Yaahting, A Parody. He is the director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies and is a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. Philbrick is a former intercollegiate All American sailor and North American Sunfish champion. He has also written articles on sailing and American maritime history for Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe. In 2002, Philbrick was named the Nathaniel Bowditch Maritime Scholar of the Year by the American Merchant Marine Museum. He is presently at work on a book about the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was an American photographer, painter, and museum curator who helped transform photography into an art form. At the turn of the century his photographs were hailed for their artistic quality. In the 1920s he produced a new style of fashion illustration and portraiture for magazines. Edward Steichen decided to study painting in Paris, and on his way there in 1900 he stopped in New York to meet Alfred Stieglitz, who was America's foremost photographer and leader of a movement to gain for photography recognition as a fine art. They became close friends. Steichen was confounder with Stieglitz of the Photo-Secession, an organization dedicated to photography as a fine art, and its exhibition gallery, called "291." The gallery exhibited photographs and introduced to America paintings, drawings, and sculpture by such modern artists as Paul Czanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi. Steichen's photographs were widely exhibited; among the most famous were his portraits of J. P. Morgan and Auguste Rodin. At the age of 68 Steichen was named director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Of the many exhibitions he created, the largest and most famous was "The Family of Man." This exhibition of 503 photographs toured throughout America and overseas. The book of the same title became a best seller. His involvement as a curator helped promote photography to the status of an acknowledged art form. In 1961 Steichen held an exhibition of his own photography at the Museum of Modern Art; a year later he retired to Connecticut. His autobiography, *A Life in Photography*, appeared in 1963, the same year he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy.