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Bigfoot

(Encyclopedia)Bigfoot or Sasquatch, large apelike creature reportedly sighted hundreds of times in the United States and Canada (most often in the Pacific Northwest) since the mid-19th cent. Similar to Asia's abomi...

bestiary

(Encyclopedia)bestiary bĕsˈchēĕrˌē [key], a type of medieval book that was widely popular, particularly from the 12th to 14th cent. The bestiary presumed to describe the animals of the world and to show what ...

Ellington, Duke

(Encyclopedia)Ellington, Duke (Edward Kennedy Ellington), 1899–1974, American jazz musician and composer, b. Washington, D.C. Ellington made his first professional appearance as a jazz pianist in 1916. By 1918 he...

Irwin, Robert

(Encyclopedia)Irwin, Robert, 1928–, American painter and sculptor, b. Long Beach, Calif. Irwin was one of the founders of the California-based Light and Space movement. Early in his career, he painted in the abst...

Lalique, René

(Encyclopedia)Lalique, René rənāˈ lälēkˈ [key], 1860–1945, French jewelery designer and glassmaker whose works are landmarks of arts nouveau and deco, b. Ay; apprenticed to Parisian goldsmith Louis Aucoq a...

Carver, Raymond

(Encyclopedia)Carver, Raymond, 1938–88, American short-story writer, b. Clatskanie, Oreg. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest, where he often set his sparely written tales of everyday blue-collar life. His per...

Plath, Sylvia

(Encyclopedia)Plath, Sylvia, 1932–63, American poet, b. Boston. Educated at Smith College and Cambridge, Plath published poems even as a child and won many academic and literary awards. Her first volume of poetry...

Spark, Dame Muriel

(Encyclopedia)Spark, Dame Muriel, 1918–2006, Scottish novelist, b. Muriel Sarah Camberg. She lived in Edinburgh, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), London, New York, and Rome, and spent her last years in Tuscany. Spark's t...

Wolfe, Thomas Clayton

(Encyclopedia)Wolfe, Thomas Clayton, 1900–1938, American novelist, b. Asheville, N.C., grad. Univ. of North Carolina, 1920, M.A. Harvard, 1922. An important 20th-century American novelist, Wolfe wrote four mammot...

Hamer, Fannie Lou

(Encyclopedia)Hamer, Fannie Lou, 1917–1977, U.S. voting rights activist and civil rights leader, b. Montgomery County, Miss. Fannie Lou Hamer was the first woman fr...