Johnny Cash is "The Man in Black." A patriarch of country music, Cash has played with and influenced some of the greatest figures in contemporary music. Cash has a voice that can bend steel. Deep, resonant, and manly, when combined with his songs' marching bass lines, the Cash voice evokes a sense of

Dark, Gritty, Intimate, Masculine, Pathos

Flannery O'Connor, in the preface to the second edition of her first novel, "Wise Blood" (1952), described herself as "an author congenitally innocent of theory, but with certain preoccupations." The preoccupation she refers to is religion. O'Connor was a Catholic writer, and her work was perpetua

Kaleidoscopic, Melancholy, Pathos, Religious, Southern gothic, Visceral

Shostakovich is often, in musical circles, called the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Yet the quality of his music is so uneven that, while a third of it is the brain-bombing work of a divine genius, another third is almost worthless, and another third scares young violinists into abandon

20th-century music, Catastrophe, Lyrical, Melancholy, Moody, Pathos, Visceral

Michael Nyman is, in many ways, the prototypical overachieving baby boomer. Born in London at the very beginning of the boom, his first days were spent under a constant threat of German invasion. As a teenager, he studied music and composition at the Royal Academy of Music and at King's College under

Dramatic, Lush, Moody, Pathos