Paul Bonwit (1862 - 1939)

Businessman. He founded the former department store Bonwitt Teller in New York City.  Family links:  Spouse:  Rebecca Woolf Bonwit (1869 – 1934)*  Children:  Harold Woolf Bonwit (1896 – 1950)*  Walter Bernard Bonwit (1901 – 1984)* *Calculated relationship

John Paris “J.P.” Bickell (1884 - 1951)

Business Magnate, Canadian Sports Benefactor. Bickell was a popular Toronto, Ontario, businessman who had a great contribution to the benefit of professional hockey. Bickell had successful career in business thanks to the success of the teams of the Toronto St. Pats and the Toronto Maple Leafs as well as many other causes. Bickell who was […]

William Peter Bettendorf (1857 - 1910)

Inventor, Businessman. As president and co-founder of Bettendorf Axle Company, he invented the Bettendorf Truck, which revolutionized the railroad industry. Before that time, railroad trucks had been made from many smaller pieces. The Bettendorf Truck was cast from one piece of steel. The city of Bettendorf, Iowa is named for him and his brother, Joseph. […]

Lauren Gail Bessette (1964 - 1999)

Sister-in-law of socialite figure John F. Kennedy, Jr., she and her sister Carolyn were killed when the plane they were traveling in crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.   The National Transportation Safety Board later determined that the probable cause was the pilot’s failure to maintain control during descent over water at […]

August “The Younger” Belmont (1853 - 1924)

Financier, Sportsman. The son of August Belmont, Sr. he was birthed into the wealth of the banking and international political scene that his father had constructed as a Prussian immigrant. An 1874 graduate of Harvard University, he is credited, through his love for sports and being a champion sprinter with inventing spiked track shoes.  Upon […]

August “The Elder” Belmont (1816 - 1890)

Financier. Born in Alzei, Rhensih, Prussia he started his banking career early by working at the entry level for the prominent House of Rothchilds at the tender age of fourteen, working his way up to positions in Frankfort and Naples then becoming their American representative in New York in 1837. His time in America proved […]

Jules Semon “J.S.” Bache (1861 - 1944)

Businessman. He began his career as a cashier in Leopold Cahn and Company in 1880. He later he headed the firm and changed the banking firm name to J.S. Bache and Company.  Family links:  Parents:  Elizabeth Van Praag Bache (1833 – 1913)  Siblings:  Henrietta Bache Kayser (1850 – 1943)*  Sarah Bache Thurnauer (1853 – 1884)* […]

John Jacob Astor, Sr (1763 - 1848)

Businessman, Merchant, Investor. He became the first multi-millionaire and creator of the first trust in the United States as a result of his fur business, the American Fur Company. Born Johann Jakob Astor in what is now known as Waldorf, in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, he began working as an assistant in his father’s […]

Elizabeth Arden (1878 - 1966)

Businesswoman. She is remembered for founding what is known as Elizabeth Arden, Incorporated, a US cosmetics empire. She was largely responsible for establishing makeup as proper and appropriate, even necessary, for a ladylike image, when before makeup had often been associated with lower classes and such professions as prostitution. Her products targeted middle-age and plain […]

Stuart Anderson (1922 - 2016)

Restaurant Chain Founder. Born in Tacoma, but raised in Seattle, he was a tank driver with Patton’s Third Army during World War II. Upon his discharge, he returned to Seattle and bought an old downtown hotel which had a small restaurant. In 1964, he opened the first Black Angus in Seattle and saw the chain […]

(1880 - 1967)

Businessman. He founded what would become the Nissan Corporation. A native of Yamaguchi prefecture, Japan, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial Industrial University. After his graduation he joined the Shibaura Engineering Works as a probationary worker. He went to the United States to learn technologies for casting, because he found casting methods in Japan to be […]

Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867 - 1931)

Author. Editor of “Woman”. Famous for his cliffhanger novels (“The Five Towns”) about the pottery area of Stoke-On-Trent.  Inscription:“Here liethe ashes ofEnochArnold BENNET authorson of Enoch & Sarah Ann BENNETTborn 27th May 1867died 29th March 1931”

DeRobigne Mortimer “D.M.” Bennett (1818 - 1882)

Journalist. He was the founder, editor, and publisher of The “Truth Seeker”, a freethought and reform periodical. Considered one of 19th-century America’s most controversial publishers, he founded the “blasphemous” (as it was called) newspaper in 1873, and his publications were censored and prohibited from newsstands. In less than a decade, he became the most successful […]

Arnold Bennett (1867 - 1931)

Arnold Bennett won a literary competition hosted by Tit-Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full-time. In 1894, he became assistant editor of the periodical Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial which was bought by […]

Dr. Gottfried Benn (1886 - 1956)

Gottfried Benn was born in a Lutheran country parsonage, a few hours from Berlin, the son and grandson of pastors in Mansfeld, now part of Putlitz in the district of Prignitz, Brandenburg. He was educated in Sellin in the Neumark and Frankfurt an der Oder. To please his father, he studied theology at the University […]

Ernest Benn (1875 - 1954)

Ernest Benn was born in Oxted, Surrey. He attended the Central Foundation Boys’ School As a civil servant in the Ministry of Munitions and Reconstruction during the First World War he came to believe in the benefits of state intervention in the economy. In the mid-1920s, however, he changed his mind and adopted “the principles of […]

Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940)

Walter Benjamin (German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn]; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, […]

Västgöta Bengtsson (1908 - 2000)

Ethnologist, Educator, Author. His name was Sixten Bengtsson, but to the people of Sweden, he was to be known as ”Västgöta-Bengtsson”. ”Västgöta” indicates the province of Västergötland where he throughout his life pursued research and documentation of peasant living, national characters, idioms and philology. He educated the people of Sweden on these subjects through TV, […]

Stephen Vincent Benet (1898 - 1943)

Author. Poet. Born in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, the son of Colonel J. Walker Benét and Frances Neill Rose, his family had a long military tradition. At ten, Benét attended the Hitchcock Military Academy, but was eventually rejected by the army due to poor vision. During WWI he worked in Washington, D.C. as a cipher clerk. […]

Juan Benet (1927 - 1993)

In 1961, Juan Benet published You Will Never Amount to Anything (Nunca llegarás a nada), his first novel. In 1966, he returned to Madrid, and in 1968 he published Return to Región (Volverás a Región), at the same time that he built the reservoir of Porma. There were already those qualifying the work of Benet as […]

Peter Bradford Benchley (1940 - 2006)

By 1971, Peter Bradford Benchley was doing various freelance jobs in his struggle to support his wife and children. During this period, when Benchley would later declare he was “making one final attempt to stay alive as a writer”, his literary agent arranged meetings with publishers. Benchley would frequently pitch two ideas, a non-fiction book […]

Nathaniel Benchley (1915 - 1981)

Born in Newton, Massachusetts to a literary family, Nathaniel Benchley was the son of Gertrude Darling and Robert Benchley (1889–1945), the noted American writer, humorist, critic, actor, and one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and […]

Jacinto Benavente (1866 - 1954)

Spanish Writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1922. He is best known for his books “El Nido Ajeno,” “Gente Conocida,” “La Noche del Sábado,” “Los Intereses Creados” and “La Malquerida.” There is a famous anecdote about his homosexuality.  While he walked by the street, he found the mother of a famous singer, […]

Ludwig Bemelmans (1898 - 1962)

Author.  “Hansi”, the first of Bemelmans’ fifteen books for children, beguiled most reviewers with its simple watercolor illustrations and nostalgic story of two children and their dog in the Austrian Tyrol. His greatest success, however, was “Madeline”, a rhymed picture book about a Parisian schoolgirl who becomes the envy of her classmates when her appendix […]

Andrei Bely (1880 - 1934)

Andrei Bely was born in Moscow, into a prominent intellectual family. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a leading mathematician who is regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His mother was not only highly intelligent but a famous society beauty, and the focus of considerable gossip. Young Boris was a polymath whose interests […]

Jerry Belson (1938 - 2006)

Jerry Belson’s writing credits include the Steven Spielberg films Always and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, several episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and I Spy. During the early 1960s, concurrent with contributing scripts for TV sitcoms with then writing partner Garry Marshall, Belson did stories for Gold Key […]

Saul Bellow (1915 - 2005)

Saul Bellow (10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book […]

Hilaire Belloc (1870 - 1953)

‘Five yards East of this stone lies the body of Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), for 28 years a member of the congregation of this Church of Our Lady of Consolation, in whose memory this tower and spire were completed in 1964 in grateful recognition of his zealous and unwavering profession of our Holy faith which he […]

Carl Michael Bellman (1740 - 1795)

Carl Michael Bellman; 4 February 1740 – 11 February 1795) was a Swedish poet, songwriter, composer and performer. Bellman is a central figure in the Swedish song tradition and remains a powerful influence in Swedish music, as well as in Scandinavian literature, to this day. Bellman is best known for two collections of poems set to […]

Dario Bellezza (1944 - 1996)

Dario Bellezza was born in Rome on September 5, 1944. After his studies at a liceo classico in his native city, from which he graduated in 1962, he worked for several Italian literary and poetry magazines: Paragone, Carte segrete, Bimestre, Periferia, and Il Policordo. Dario Bellezza entered the Roman intellectual world in the mid-1960s when, thanks […]