Compact Biographies

“I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.” – Ulysses S Grant

Ulysses S. Grant Biography

Born on 27 April 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio, Hiram Ulysses Grant was a United States general and commander during the American Civil War for the Union armies and later became the 18th president of the United States. His father was Jesse Root Grant who was a tanner as well as a businessman, and Ulysses was his firstborn son.

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He grew up in Georgetown, Ohio experiencing a fairly nondescript childhood. But as a child, he was greatly interested in horses and showed promise as a horseman. As a youth, he was timid and reserved, taking after his mother more than his father who was quite outgoing.

The thought of working at his father’s tannery business was not one that Ulysses savoured and

at age seventeen his father orchestrated a way for Ulysses to enter the U.S Military Academy at West Point — quite an honour. The school incorrectly wrote his name as Ulysses S Grant, which in order to avoid being rejected by the school, Grant accepted as his new name. Ulysses did not do well at West Point and earned average grades as well as demerits for poor dress and tardiness. He was excellent at horsemanship, and did well in mathematics and geology but decided that the Academy was not charming. He did graduate in 1843 21st out of 39 students, and happy to be rid of the place. Originally, his plan was to leave the military after serving his mandatory four years of active duty.

After graduating as a lieutenant, Ulysses met his future wife Julia Dent in St. Louis, Missouri. He proposed and she accepted in 1844.  However, before they could have a wedding, he was sent to serve in the Mexican American war. In this war, Grant was a quartermaster and oversaw moving supplies efficiently. Learning from other generals, he had the opportunity to lead in combat, being credited for bravery under fire.

During this time, he felt that the war was wrong, seeing that its only purpose was to increase America’s territory as well as slavery.

After a long four-year engagement, Julia and Ulysses were married in 1848.  They ended up having four children over six years. He was sent to Fort Vancouver which is now in Washington State. Because he loved his family, he wanted to get them to the West Coast to be closer to him, but unfortunately, he failed at several business ventures. Feeling depressed, he drank which gave him an ill-fated reputation that he carried throughout his military career.

In 1854, he moved back to Missouri as a civilian, ultimately working at his father’s tanning business in 1860, heralding a low point in his life.

In 1861, as part of the American Civil War, Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter. Seeing this inspired Ulysses’ patriotism and he re-joined the military. At first, he could not earn an appointment but later commanded the 21st Illinois Volunteer Regiment which was very unscrupulous.

Putting his ragtag band into order, in 1862, Grant’s ground forces took both Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. These battles are recorded to be the earliest notable Union victories of the American Civil War. Grant earned the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant”.

Although he won some of the most significant battles of the Civil War including taking the city of Vicksburg, the rumours of Grant’s heavy drinking surrounded him for the rest of his campaign. However, those closest to him said that he was sober and showed extreme focus even in the midst of battle.

Ulysses S Grant was different than most of his predecessors. Whereas others believed that taking territory was pivotal to winning the war, Grant believed that disabling the Confederate armies was most important and, because of this belief, focused on destroying General Robert E.

“We are a fact-gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody.” – J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover Biography

John Edgar Hoover was born on 1 January 1895, in Washington D.C. in the United States. His mother, Anna Marie was from a Swiss-German background. There was also German, mixed with English ancestry in his father’s background too. Interestingly, although two of his siblings had birth certificates, which was a requirement at the time in Washington, John Edgar didn’t have one, and what’s more, one would not be filed for him until 1938 when he was 43 years old.

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Hoover’s first job came along when he was eighteen years old, in 1913. It was this job, as a messenger in the orders department for the Library of Congress that Hoover credited with giving him a foundation for collecting and collating material and information, something which would be profoundly important when he began to accumulate evidence and profiles during his work at the FBI.

Hoover grew up in the neighborhood of Capitol Hill in an area called Eastern Market and went to Central High School. He taught himself to talk at a fast pace in order to overcome a stutter and this characteristic would continue into adulthood. After High School, J Edgar attended the George Washington University Law School from where he graduated with a bachelor’s law degree in 1916. He received a masters degree in law the following year.

As soon as he received his master’s degree, he was hired by the Justice Department’s War Emergency Division and became head of the Alien Enemy Bureau which was given powers to arrest and detain without trial at the beginning of World War I any foreigners who were deemed to be disloyal.

After the war, in 1919, J Edgar Hoover became head of the new General Intelligence Division within the Bureau of Investigation and later in 1921 became the Bureau’s deputy head. On 10 May 1924, he was made the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation by President Calvin Coolidge. When he took over, Hoover was found to be unpredictable in his management style, often firing agents or managing them out of the Bureau simply for looking stupid or because they were “pinheads”. Law enforcement officers around the country though often received praise and support from Hoover, a tactic which enabled him to create a huge network of support and admiration across the country.

During the 1930’s J Edgar Hoover moved to get certain crimes such as bank robberies and the activities of criminal gangs recognized as federal crimes so that his department could get involved and take credit for apprehending suspects. Eventually, this paid off, after some setbacks, most notably in Hoover’s attempt to arrest notorious bank robber John Dillinger, something which came close to ending his career, Hoover’s men started to gain notable successes. Machine Gun Kelly was arrested in 1933 and sent to Alcatraz, John Dillinger was killed by Bureau agents in 1934, and on 1 May 1936, a year after the Bureau changed its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI for short, the gangster Alvin Karpis was arrested by Hoover himself.

In the late 1930’s and in the lead-up to the Second World War, the FBI investigated any possibility of German saboteurs planning attacks within the United States and was the primary agency responsible for counterespionage in the United States. It was during the war that the FBI received permission to wiretap persons suspected of subversive activities from President Roosevelt although including within this was a requirement for the Attorney General to be informed of each case where wiretaps were used. The Attorney General at the time, though,

“Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside-down.” – Paul Newman.

Paul Newman Biography

Paul Leonard Newman was born on 26 January 1925 in Shaker Heights, which is on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. He was the second son of Arthur Sigmund Newman who was a Jewish descendant of Hungarian and Polish immigrants. His mother, Theresa, practiced Christian Science and was herself an immigrant, having been born into a Roman Catholic family in Humenné in what is now the Republic of Slovakia. Paul Newman himself was not religious, but when asked, always described himself as Jewish, explaining that it was more of a challenge. His mother worked in the successful sporting goods store owned by his father whilst also being tasked with raising Paul and his elder brother Arthur, who eventually became production manager in the store.

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Paul though had no interest in the family business and showed early promise as an actor when he played the part of a court jester in a production of Robin Hood at his school, Shaker Heights High School when he was only seven years old. When he was ten he joined the Curtain Pullers children’s theater program and performed in Saint George and the Dragon at the Cleveland Playhouse theater. After graduating from Shaker Heights in 1943, Newman attended Ohio University in Athens and was initiated into the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity.

Newman enrolled in the Navy’s V-12 pilot training program at Yale but it was discovered he was colourblind and so had to drop out. Aviation Radioman Third Class Newman served in World War II after qualifying instead for torpedo bombers following training as a radioman and rear gunner. He was sent to Barbers Point, Hawaii and flew as a turret gunner in Avenger torpedo bombers. His and other replacement units were assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill just before the Battle of Okinawa but in the Spring of 1945 when they were supposed to fly out to the ship, Newman’s plane was grounded due to his pilot having an ear infection. The rest of the squadron flew out as scheduled and became casualties when the Bunker Hill was attacked by Kamikaze aircraft.

After the war, Paul Newman attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama and economics in 1949. He toured with several theatre companies before moving to New York to study at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. In the same year as his graduation, he married Jackie Witte and he was accompanied by her when he arrived in New York in 1951. They lived on Staten Island and Paul made his Broadway theatre debut two years later. He would appear on Broadway several more times over the next few years, but also during this time, Newman was introduced to working in television with his first credited role coming in an episode of Tales of Tomorrow called Ice from Space.

In 1954 he appeared in a screen test for East of Eden at the side of James Dean. Newman didn’t win that part but in the same year, he co-starred Frank Sinatra in a live, colour TV broadcast of Our Town, with him being the last minute replacement for James Dean. He would take parts meant for James Dean on two other occasions, the first being the part of Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun and then again as Rocky Graziano in Somebody up there Likes Me. Both of these movies were filmed after James Dean’s death.

In 1957, Paul Newman reconnected with an actress he had first met in 1953, when he filmed The Long, Hot Summer, alongside Joanne Woodward. That same year Newman was divorced from Jackie Witte and in 1958, the same year that their movie was released, Newman and Joanne Woodward were married. The movie won Newman the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival the same year. He also starred opposite another cinema icon,

“Flying a good airplane doesn’t require near as much attention as a motor car” – Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh Biography

Charles Lindbergh was born on 4 February 1902 in Detroit, Michigan, USA but grew up in the Little Falls area of Minnesota and in Washington D.C. His father was Charles August Lindbergh, a Swedish immigrant who had arrived in the United States with his parents when he was a small child and went on to become a U.S. Congressman in 1907. His mother was Evangeline Lodge Land, a chemistry teacher who taught at various schools including Little Falls High School where Charles would graduate from in 1918. As his parents separated when he was only nine years old, Charles attended many other schools as he switched between living with his father in Washington and his mother in California. He enrolled in college in 1920 but dropped out before heading to Lincoln, Nebraska where he began flight training in March 1922.

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Charles had always demonstrated an interest in all things mechanical, especially motor cars and motorcycles and he soon became interested in flying too. He flew for the first time on 9 April 1922 after he enrolled with the flying school at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation. Soon after he started to take lessons but needed more money to become qualified enough to fly solo. This he raised by barnstorming, wing walking and parachuting. He first flew solo in May 1923 at a former army training field in Georgia, in an army surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” which he bought for $500. After a week of practice, he took off for his first long-distance flight of some 140 miles when he headed west to Montgomery in Alabama.

In 1923 he took on the persona of “Daredevil Lindbergh” and spent most of the year barnstorming. During this time, Lindbergh also made his first nighttime flight while at Lake Village in Arkansas. As well as barnstorming he also provided ferry and transport services, flying a doctor on two occasions across the Wisconsin River which was impassable at the time due to flooding. He even flew his father who was running for the Senate to a campaign stop. 1923 didn’t go without mishap though. He broke a propeller on a couple of occasions and even once put his plane into a ditch, an incident that left him grounded for a week while he waited for repairs. Shortly after, he sold the “Jenny” to a student and headed off by train, eventually arriving at Brooks Field on 19 March 1924 where he commenced a year of flight training with the army. He graduated first in his class in March 1925, even though during his time there he had a dangerous near miss when he had to bail out of his S.E. 5 due to a mid-air collision during combat maneuvers. His successful graduation earned him his wings and the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. As the army didn’t need pilots at the time, Lindbergh went back to civilian life but would remain a reserve officer and occasionally flew a few hours for the military after joining the 110th Observation Squadron. He was promoted twice more, achieving the rank of captain in July 1926.

After also previously becoming a pilot with the Robertson Aircraft Corporation in 1925 where he was taken on to devise the route for an airmail contract between St. Louis and Chicago, he became their chief pilot and opened the service on 13 April 1926. He avoided serious injury after bailing out on two occasions, once due to bad weather and once due to mechanical problems, each time after landing, ensuring that the mail was located and sent on to its destination.

In February 1927 he headed off to San Diego, California where he oversaw the design and construction of the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane that would make him famous, after the Ryan Aircraft Company agreed to build it for $10580. It flew for the first time only 2 months later and test flights were made to St.

“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves” – Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley Biography

Mary Shelley was an English author who is primarily remembered for only a single work. Although Frankenstein would become her most popular work, she was a dedicated novelist and wrote many books and stories. Despite personal tragedy, she rose above the loss and controversy in her life to become one of the most well-known and respected female British novelists of all time.

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She was born Mary Godwin on 30 August 1797 in London, England. She was the second child of Mary Wollstonecraft who was a well-known writer, philosopher, feminist and educator. Although her mother would die shortly after her birth, Mary knew a lot about her from reading her memoirs.

Mary had no formal schooling, but her father took it upon himself to teach her a wide variety of topics and as he sold books as well as papers and maps from his small, and unprofitable, business, she also had access to a wide array of written knowledge. She also had the significant benefit of a personal governess and a tutor who assisted with her education meaning that she ended up better educated than most women of her day.

Mary met the man who would become her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was in her late teens.  By 1814 his marriage was already failing and his feelings for Mary had grown significantly as the two shared similar ideas about social reforms and other liberal ideals. Shelley came from a wealthy family and held less-than-respectful views towards money.  His family viewed his frivolous spending to be a waste of the family resources, so they limited his access to them.

Mary and Percy began to meet secretly at her mother’s graveside and although Mary was only 17 whilst Percy was 22, and still legally married, the two fell deeply in love. It is said that Mary Shelley lost her virginity to Percy on her mother’s grave. Although her father was firmly against it, the couple eloped and traveled to France.

Percy and Mary lived a life detached from their families as Mary’s father would have nothing to do with her or her illicit affair with the still-married Percy. Percy, meanwhile, was broke and was often dodging creditors while simultaneously trying to encourage a three-way relationship between himself, Mary, and their friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. In this case, however, Mary’s liberal ideals failed her and although she believed strongly in the concept of free love and was not against the idea on paper, in practice her heart belonged singularly to Percy. However, a friendship did grow between Mary and Thomas, and in 1815 she wrote a letter to him informing him of the death of her premature baby, Clara, and that she wanted to see him. Mary descended into severe depression after this episode and even claimed to have seen and been haunted by visions of her dead child.

In 1816, Mary gave birth to a son, William, and Percy and Mary traveled to Geneva to meet with Lord Byron and the mother of his daughter Claire Clairmont, who was also Mary’s stepsister. While spending time at Lord Byron’s beautiful Geneva villa, the weather became inclement and never really improved, resulting in the group spending a lot of time indoors. They entertained each other by telling stories and eventually Lord Byron challenged everyone to each write their own ghost story. Mary at first had trouble coming up with a concept but as she began to ponder on the ideas of life and death and whether the dead could live again, she had a strong horrific vision of a reassembled corpse coming back to life. The powerful vision kept her from sleeping and she referred to it as a ‘waking dream.’ Mary originally intended Frankenstein to be a short story but with the encouragement of Byron, Shelley,