When Alvin Ailey stumbled into Lester Horton's dance theater at UCLA, he abandoned his original plan to major in foreign languages. Instead, he moved to fulfill his destiny and become one of the finest, most influential, and most beloved Modern choreographers of this century. Just one year after his

African american fiction, Euphoric, Expansive, Kinetic, Political, Polychromatic, Spiritual

The mystically inspired Louis Kahn was born in Estonia and raised in the United States. He acquired a thorough grounding in the Beaux-Art school of architecture and worked through the 1920s and 1930s first as a draughtsman and then as a head designer. Kahn infused his buildings with monumentalism, ri

Grand, Layered, Modernist architecture, Monumental, Sincere, Spiritual

Philippe Starck appears to be something of a wunderkind in the design world -- many see his persona as a combination of the outrageous "bad boy" and the traditional French "je ne sais quoi." In fact, his foray into the world of design stems from somewhat dark, existential roots. As the story goes,

Biomorphic, Dramatic, Joyful, Late modern, Monochromatic, Sensual, Spiritual

All writers struggle with the weight of moral responsibility, even if they profess to create an amoral art. Few writers, however, have carried this burden through the confluence of political and cultural rivers in the way Chinua Achebe has. Achebe came of age in Africa's largest country, Nigeria,

Intimate, Mythic, Political, Post-colonial literature, Spiritual