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Scientific American is a popular science magazine published first weekly and later monthly since August 28, 1845, making it one of the oldest continuously published periodicals in the United States. It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience.

It had a monthly circulation of roughly 555,000 US and 90,000 international as of December 2005. It is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience. In the past, scientists interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise made up the magazine’s target audience. Now, the publication is aimed at educational general readers who are interested in scientific issues. The magazine was founded by Rufus M. Porter as a single-page newsletter and throughout its early years Scientific American put much emphasis on reports of what was going on at the US patent office.

The publication reported on a broad range of inventions that includes perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds a place in nearly every automobile manufactured. The magazine evolved into something of a “workbench” publication, similar to the 20th century incarnation of Popular Science.

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Ira Levin was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan. He attended Drake University in Iowa for two years before transferring to New York University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950. While in college, he entered a television screenwriting contest sponsored by CBS. He was a runner-up and sold his script to NBC where it became an episode on an anthology suspense series in 1951.

While still in his twenties and writing for TV, Levin published his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying about a cold-blooded ambitious young man who murders his wealthy girlfriend, gets away with it, and gets involved with her sister. The novel won the 1954 Edgar Award for the best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America and it was adapted into a film twice – in 1956 with Robert Wagner and in 1991 with Matt Dillon.

Rosemary’s Baby was published in 1967 and told the story of a young New York bride who may have been impregnated by the Devil. It was made into a critically and commercially successful film in 1968, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. The Stepford Wives was published in 1972 and featured women in an idyllic suburb who appear to have been replaced by subservient androids. It too was adapted into a film twice – in 1975 with Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss and in 2004 with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick. Levin died in November 2007 from natural causes.

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, known then as weird fiction. Lovecraft’s major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: the notion that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. He has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities.

Lovecraft’s works were quite pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christian humanism. Although, his readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20^th century. Lovecraft’s name is synonymous with horror fiction. His writing, particularly, the Cthulhu Mythos, has influenced fiction authors all over the world, and Lovecraftian elements can be found in novels, movies, music, comic books, and cartoons.

Many modern horror writers, including Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale and Neil Gaiman, cite Lovecraft as one of their primary influences. His stories made it into the pages of prominent pulp magazines like Weird Tales but not many people knew his name. Lovecraft corresponded regularly with other contemporary writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth. In 1936, he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and died on March 15, 1937 in Providence.

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Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky on July 18, 1937. During a two year stint in the Air Force he worked as a sports reporter for the base newspaper. There were two significant pre-occupations that were constant subjects in his writing: sports and politics. His first book, Hell’s Angels, was an inside look at the infamous biker gang and resulted in Thompson getting beaten up by some bikers for his troubles. It was published in 1966 and established him as one of the shining new stars of the New Journalism movement of the ‘60s that included Tom Wolfe, but he refused to be pigeon-holed and carved out with his own unique vision.

The origins for his most famous work — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — started off quite humbly. Thompson was assigned to write captions for a photo-essay on the Mint 400 off-road motorcycle race in Las Vegas for Sports Illustrated magazine. At some point, the editor for Rolling Stone magazine heard that Thompson was in Vegas and asked him to also cover the National District Attorneys Association’s Third Annual Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. When Sports Illustrated rejected his work Thompson took the Rolling Stone gig. Objectivity was thrown out the window in favor of a highly personal form of reporting.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was first published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971.

In 1970, Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen as the Freak Power candidate and lost by only a handful of votes after campaigning for the legalization of drugs and for Aspen to be renamed Fat City. Thompson was immortalized in film first by Bill Murray in the cinematic misfire known as Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) and by Johnny Depp in the warped masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Hunter was also the inspiration for Uncle Duke, right down to his trademark aviator sunglasses and cigarette holder, in Garry Trudeau’s popular comic strip, Doonesbury. Thompson was not always crazy about how he was portrayed by others, infamously threatening to disembowel Murray the next time they met and claimed that he would set Trudeau on fire. Over the years he made peace with both men.

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