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Jimmy Breslin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and author. He has written numerous novels and columns of his have appeared regularly in various newspapers in his hometown of New York City. He was a regular columnist for the newspaper Newsday until his retirement on November 2, 2004.

Breslin’s career as a investigative journalist led him to cultivate ties with various Mafia and criminal elements in the city, not always with positive results. In 1970, he was viciously attacked and beaten at The Suite, a restaurant then owned by Lucchese crime family associate Henry Hill. The attack was carried out by mobster Jimmy Burke, who objected to an article Breslin had written involving another member of the Lucchese family, Paul Vario.

In 1977, at the height of the Son of Sam scare in New York City, the killer, later identified as David Berkowitz, addressed letters to Breslin. Among his notable columns, perhaps the best known was published the day after John F. Kennedy’s funeral, focusing on the man who had dug the President’s grave. Breslin has received numerous accolades throughout his career. In 1985, he received a George Polk Award for Metropolitan reporting, while in 1986, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

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Winnie-the-Pooh, commonly shortened to Pooh Bear, is a fictional bear created by A.A. Milne. The character first appeared in book form in Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Milne also included several poems about Pooh Bear in the children’s poetry books When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.

Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the basis for the character Christopher Robin. His toys also lent their names to most of the other characters, except for Owl and Rabbit, who where probably based on real animals. Christopher Milne had named his teddy after Winnipeg, a bear which he and his father often saw at London Zoo, and “Pooh,” a swan they had met while on holiday.

The home of the Milnes, Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, was the basis for the setting of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The name of the fictional “Hundred Acre Wood” is reminiscent of the Five Hundred Acre Wood, which lies just outside Ashdown Forest and includes some of the locations mentioned in the book, such as the Enchanted Place. Pooh first appeared in December 1925, when what became the first chapter of the book Winnie-the-Pooh was commissioned as a Christmas story by London’s Evening News. The book was published on October 14, 1926.

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Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950 to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. The strip is considered to be one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium with 17,897 strips published in all.

At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries and was translated into 21 languages. It helped cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in many newspapers. Peanuts achieved considerable success for its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, won or were nominated for Emmy Awards.

The holiday specials remain quite popular and are currently broadcast on ABC in the U.S. Peanuts has been described as “the most shining example of the American success story in the comic strip field.” The final daily original comic strip was published on January 3, 2000. Following its finish, many newspapers began reprinting older strips under the title Classic Peanuts. The syndicate offered papers strips from either the 1960s or the 1990s, with the Sunday edition being from the 1960s.

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William Faulkner was an American author and one of the most influential writers of the 20^th century. In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His reputation is based on his novels, novellas, and short stories. Most of Faulkner’s works are set in his native state of Mississippi, and he is considered one of the most important “Southern writers,” along with Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams among others.

Faulkner was raised and heavily influenced by the state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and culture of the South as a whole. When he was four-years-old, his entire family moved to the town of Oxford, the model for the town of “Jefferson” in his fiction. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of blacks and whites, and his characterization of Southern characters. Faulkner was living in New Orleans when he wrote his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, in 1925 after being influenced by Sherwood Anderson to try fiction.

From the early 1920, Faulkner published 13 novels and numerous short stories, the body of work that grounds his reputation and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize at the age of 52. During this time, he wrote his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! In the early 1940s, film director Howard Hawks invited Faulkner to come to Hollywood to become a screenwriter for the films Hawks was making, most notably an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

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The Hobbit is an award-winning children’s book and fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, written in the tradition of the fairy tale. He wrote the story in the early 1930s to amuse his three sons. The book was published on September 21, 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction.

The Hobbit has sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide since first publication. The book is set in a time “between the dawn of Faerie and the Dominion of Men,” and follows the quest of home-loving Bilbo Baggins to win his share of the treasure guarded by the dragon. His journey takes him from light-hearted, rural surroundings into darker, deeper territory. The story is told in the form of an episodic quest: most chapters introduce a specific creature or type of creature. The prose adventure is interspersed with songs and poetry, many of which serve to lighten the tone otherwise frightening or dramatic scenes.

Critics have drawn parallels with Tolkien’s own experiences and the themes of other writers who fought in World War I. A sequel was requested by his publishers and Tolkien made accommodations for it while working on The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit has never been out of print and its ongoing legacy encompasses many adaptations for stage, screen and radio.

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Beetle Bailey is a comic strip set in a United States Army military post, created by Mort Walker. It is among the oldest comic strips still being produced by the original creator. The strip also remains among the most popular comic strips today.

In 1948 and 1949, Walker submitted his comics to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. The newspaper’s editor suggested that Walker draw some comics in a university setting featuring one character who wore a hat down over his eyes. Walker named the character Spider, after a fraternity brother but changed the name to Beetle. King Features Syndicate bought it and Bailey was added as a family name in honor of the Post editor.

Beetle Bailey first ran in 12 newspapers on September 4, 1950. On March 13, 1951, during the Korean War, Walker had Beetle Bailey enlist in the Army. All characters other than Beetle were dropped, and new ones created. The struggling comic strip soon appeared in more newspapers, beginning Beetle’s rise to popularity. Most of the humor revolves around the mostly inept characters stationed at Camp Swampy, inspired by Camp Crowder where Walker had been stationed while in the Army. He received the Reuben Award in 1953 and the National Cartoonist Society Humor Strip Award in 1966 and 1969 for the strip.

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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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