Alvah Bessie (1904 - 1985)

Alvah Bessie became initially known for his translations of avant-garde French literature, including Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs  and The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. During the 1930s, Bessie became alarmed at the rise of fascism, and began working for the anti-fascist cause. No stranger to soldiering, through 1938 Bessie fought as a volunteer in the […]

Byron Haskin (1899 - 1984)

Byron Conrad Haskin (April 22, 1899 – April 16, 1984) was an American film and television director. He was born in Portland, Oregon. Byron Haskin is known for directing The War of the Worlds (1953), one of many films where he teamed with producer George Pal. In his early career, he was a special effects artist, […]

Ben Hecht (1894 - 1964)

Ben Hecht /ˈhɛkt/ (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write thirty-five books and some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or […]

Ranald MacDougall (1915 - 1973)

Ranald MacDougall (March 10, 1915 – December 12, 1973) was an American screenwriter who scripted such films as Mildred Pierce (1945), The Unsuspected (1947), June Bride (1948), and The Naked Jungle (1954), and shared screenwriting credit for 1963’s Cleopatra. He also directed a number of films, including 1957’s Man on Fire with Bing Crosby and […]

William C. Mellor (1903 - 1963)

William C. Mellor, A.S.C. (29 June 1903 – 30 April 1963) was a cinematographer who worked at Paramount, MGM and 20th Century Fox during a career that spanned three decades. After earning his stripes on a string of B-movies in the 1930s, he first started making serious inroads as a leading cinematographer in 1940 when […]

Clifford Odets (1906 - 1963)

Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Odets was widely seen as successor to Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill as O’Neill began to retire from Broadway’s commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash in the mid-1930s. From early 1935 on, Odets’ socially relevant dramas proved extremely influential, […]

Ernest Haller (1896 - 1970)

With his older brother’s help, Ernest Haller first joined the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, also known as the Biograph Studio or Biograph, in 1914 as an actor. However, he seemed to have realized his true passion fairly quickly, for he switched to the camera department just within a year of joining the studio. At […]

Jerry Wald (1911 - 1962)

Born Jerome Irving Wald to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he had a brother and sons who were active in show business. He began writing a radio column for the New York Evening Graphic, while studying at New York University. This led to him producing several Rambling ‘Round Radio Row featurettes for Vitaphone, […]

Irving Ravetch (1920 - 2010)

Irving Ravetch was born to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Sylvia (Shapiro) and I. Shalom Ravetch, a rabbi. His mother was born in Palestine and his father in the Ukraine. Ravetch was an aspiring playwright when he enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles. Following graduation, he joined the young […]

Martin Ritt (1914 - 1990)

Unable to work in the television industry, Martin Ritt returned to the theater for several years. By 1956, the Red Scare had decreased in intensity, and he turned to film directing. His first film as director was Edge of the City (1957), an important film for Ritt and an opportunity to give voice to his […]

Robert Alan Aurthur (1922 - 1978)

Robert Alan Aurthur (June 10, 1922 – November 20, 1978) was an American screenwriter, director and producer. In the early years of television, he wrote for Studio One and then moved on to write episodes of Mister Peepers (1952–53). He followed with teleplays for Campbell Playhouse (1954), Justice (1954), Goodyear Television Playhouse (1953–54) and Producers’ Showcase(1955). […]

Gene Saks (1921 - 2015)

Gene Saks was born Jean Michael Saks in New York City, the son of Beatrix (née Lewkowitz) and Morris J. Saks. He studied at Cornell University and trained for acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the German director Erwin Piscator. Gene Saks made his acting debut on Broadway in […]

Irving Fisher (1867 - 1947)

Irving Fisher was born in Saugerties, New York. His father was a teacher and a Congregational minister, who raised his son to believe he must be a useful member of society. Despite being raised in religious family, he later on became an atheist. As a child, he had remarkable mathematical ability and a flair for […]

Joseph Schumpeter (1883 - 1950)

Joseph Schumpeter was born in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia (now Třešť in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary) in 1883 to Catholic German-speaking parents. His father owned a factory, but he died when Joseph was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. After attending school at the Theresianum, Schumpeter began […]

Hyman Minsky (1919 - 1996)

Hyman Minsky proposed theories linking financial market fragility, in the normal life cycle of an economy, with speculative investment bubbles endogenous to financial markets. Minsky claimed that in prosperous times, when corporate cash flow rises beyond what is needed to pay off debt, a speculative euphoria develops, and soon thereafter debts exceed what borrowers can […]

Bertil Ohlin (1899 - 1979)

Having received his B.A. from Lund University 1917 and his MSc. from Stockholm School of Economics in 1919. He obtained an M.A. from Harvard University in 1923 and his doctorate from Stockholm University in 1924. In 1925 he became a professor at the University of Copenhagen. In 1929 he debated with John Maynard Keynes, contradicting […]

James Meade (1907 - 1995)

James Meade made lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford in 1931 and continued until 1937. Meade along with young enthusiasts such as Roy Harrod, Henry Phelps Brown, Charlie Hitch, Robert Hall, Lindley Fraser, Maurice Allen and Eric Hargreaves, who was his old tutor at Oriel College, started the concept of teaching economics as a regular subject […]

Jan Pen (1921 - 2010)

Jan Pen studied at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where in 1950 he received his PhD with a thesis concerning the theory of collective wage negotiations. He was Director General Economic Policy at the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In 1956 he was appointed professor of political economy and the theory of public finance at the Faculty […]

Trygve Haavelmo (1911 - 1999)

After attending Oslo Cathedral School, Trygve Haavelmo received a degree in economics from the University of Oslo in 1930 and eventually joined the Institute of Economics with the recommendation of Ragnar Frisch. Haavelmo was Frisch’s assistant for a period of time until he was appointed as head of computations for the institute. In 1936, Haavelmo studied […]

Paul Ehrenfest (1880 - 1933)

Paul Ehrenfest was born and grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family from Loštice in Moravia. His parents, Sigmund Ehrenfest and Johanna Jellinek, ran a grocery store. Although the family was not overly religious, Paul studied Hebrew and the history of the Jewish people. Later he always emphasized his Jewish roots. Ehrenfest excelled in […]

Leonid Kantorovich (1912 - 1986)

Leonid Kantorovich was born on 19 January 1912, to a Russian Jewish family. His father was a doctor practicing in Saint Petersburg. In 1926, at the age of fourteen, he began his studies at the Leningrad University. He graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics in 1930, and began his graduate studies. In 1934, at the […]

Jan Tinbergen (1903 - 1994)

Jan Tinbergen was the eldest of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and Jeannette van Eek. His brother Nikolaas “Niko” Tinbergen would also win a Nobel Prize (for physiology, during 1973) for his work in ethology, while his youngest brother Luuk would become a famous ornithologist. Between 1921 and 1925, Tinbergen studied mathematics and physics […]

Kenneth Arrow (1921 - 2017)

From 1946 to 1949 Kenneth Arrow spent his time partly as a graduate student at Columbia and partly as a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago. During that time he also held the rank of Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and worked […]

James Tobin (1918 - 2002)

In 1950 James Tobin moved to Yale University, where he remained for the rest of his career. He joined the Cowles Foundation, which moved to Yale in 1955, also serving as its president between 1955–1961 and 1964–1965. His main research interest was to provide microfoundations to Keynesian economics, with a special focus on monetary economics. […]

Wassily Leontief (1905 - 1999)

Wassily Leontief is credited with developing early contributions to input-output analysis and earned the Nobel Prize in Economics for his development of its associated theory. He has also made contributions in other areas of economics, such as international trade where he documented the Leontief paradox. He was also one of the first to establish the […]

Paul Samuelson (1915 - 2009)

Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist and the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Swedish Royal Academies stated, when awarding the prize, that he “has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic […]

Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006)

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of […]

Friedrich Hayek (1899 - 1992)

Friedrich Hayek CH (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈaʊ̯ɡʊst ˈhaɪ̯ɛk]; 8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek and frequently referred to as F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with […]

Russell Kirk (1918 - 1994)

Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan. He was the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk. Kirk obtained his BA at Michigan State University and a M.A. at Duke University. During World War II, he served in the American armed forces and corresponded with a libertarian writer, Isabel Paterson, […]

Michael Oakeshott (1901 - 1990)

Michael Oakeshott was the son of Francs Maude (Hellicar) and Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant and a major member of the Fabian Society. George Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St. George’s School, Harpenden from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster Cecil Grant later became a friend. During […]