Guillaume Apollinaire
(August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918) was a poet, writer, and art critic.
Born Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky/Kostrowicki in Rome, Italy, he was one of the many artists who worked in the Montmartre district of Paris during an era of great creativity. His mother was Angelica Kostrowicki, a Polish countess, his father possibly Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss-Italian aristocrat who disappeared early from Apollinaire's life.
One of the most popular members of the artistic community in Montparnasse, his friends and collaborators during that period were Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon, Marie Laurencin, Andre Derain, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, and Marcel Duchamp.
In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, an offshoot branch of the cubist movement. On September 7 of the same year, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion stealing the Mona Lisa, but later released him.
Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, using traditional forms and modern imagery.
Also in 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres cubistes on the cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.
He fought in World War I and in 1916 was seriously wounded in the temple (see photo). While recovering from his wound, he wrote the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917) (the subject of an opera by Francis Poulenc premiered in 1947), which he described as surrealist, making it one of the first works to be so described. Earlier he coined the word surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes.
In 1907, Apollinaire wrote the well-known pornographic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges). Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel.
Another pornographic novel attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt. The book was made into a movie in 1987.
The weakened Apollinaire died of influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), was published.
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George C Marshall
Born: 31 December 1880
Birthplace: Uniontown, Pennsylvania
Death: 16 October 1959
Best Known As: World War II-era U.S. General and Secretary of State
George Catlett Marshall served in the U.S. army in France during World War I, emerging as aide-de-camp to General John Joseph Pershing. Marshall rose through the administrative ranks and served as the army's Chief of Staff during World War II, then as U.S. ambassador to China. He returned to the U.S. to serve in President Harry Truman's cabinet, as Secretary of State and then Secretary of Defense. Beginning in 1948 General Marshall oversaw the implementation of the European Recovery Program, since called The Marshall Plan, an economic policy to help Western Europe recover from the devastation of World War II. For his efforts toward world peace, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
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