Who Is Jeff Bezos?

1. A childhood in New Mexico, Texas and Florida

Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born on 12 January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, Jacklyn, was seventeen when he was born, and his father, Ted Jorgensen, left the family when Jeff was a baby. When Jeff was four, his mother married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who had arrived in the United States as a teenager and worked as an engineer for the oil company Exxon. Miguel adopted Jeff, giving him the surname Bezos, and the family moved to Houston, Texas, where Miguel worked, and later to Miami, Florida. Jeff has described his stepfather as the most important influence on his early life, a man who worked hard, who was patient, and who taught him that hard work mattered more than talent.

As a child Bezos was fascinated by how things worked. He took apart his crib with a screwdriver, built an alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room, and spent summers on his grandfather's ranch in Texas, where he learned to fix windmills, vaccinate cattle and repair tractors. His grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, had been a regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission, and he encouraged Jeff's curiosity about science. At school in Miami, Bezos was a strong student: he was the valedictorian of his high school class, and he won a prize for a science project. He was also interested in space from an early age, and he has said that he wanted to build space hotels and colonies even as a teenager, an ambition that later became Blue Origin.

In 1982 he went to Princeton University, where he first studied physics and then switched to electrical engineering and computer science, graduating in 1986. Princeton gave him a rigorous technical education and a network of contacts, but it also taught him something else: that he was not the best physicist in his class, and that his talents lay in building things and in business rather than in pure science. After graduating he worked in New York, first at a telecommunications company and then at a hedge fund called D. E. Shaw, where he became a senior vice-president at a young age. It was at D. E. Shaw, in 1994, that he saw the numbers that changed his life: the use of the internet was growing at an extraordinary rate, and he decided that he had to build a business on it.

2. The garage in Seattle: the founding of Amazon

In the summer of 1994 Bezos left his job at D. E. Shaw, drove across the United States to Seattle with his wife MacKenzie, and started a company in the garage of their rented house. He chose Seattle because it was close to a large book wholesaler and because the state of Washington had a small population, which mattered for tax reasons at the time. He chose books as his first product because there were more books in print than any other kind of product, because books were easy to ship, and because no physical bookstore could stock them all. The company was first called Cadabra, but he changed the name to Amazon, after the river, because it suggested scale and because it began with the letter A, which put it at the top of alphabetical lists.

Amazon's website went live in July 1995. In the first month it sold books in all fifty American states and in more than forty countries, and the orders were packed on the floor of the garage. Bezos and his small team worked long hours, and the company grew quickly, but it lost money for years. Bezos told investors that he was building for the long term, and that he was willing to lose money now in order to build a company that would last. In 1997 Amazon listed its shares on the stock market, raising the money it needed to grow. The company's share price rose and fell sharply, and during the dot-com crash of 2000 and 2001 many people predicted it would fail. Bezos kept going, cutting costs and focusing on the customer, and by the early 2000s the company was growing steadily and moving towards profit.

The key to Amazon's growth was a set of principles that Bezos repeated for years. The first was customer obsession: the company should focus on what the customer wanted, not on what its competitors were doing. The second was a willingness to invent and to fail: Amazon tried many things that did not work, and Bezos said that the successes paid for the failures. The third was long-term thinking: decisions should be judged over years, not quarters. These principles were written into the company's culture, and they were repeated in the annual letters Bezos wrote to shareholders, which became famous in the business world. Whether the principles explain Amazon's success, or whether they are a story told after the fact, is debated, but they were certainly part of how Bezos presented himself and his company to the world.

3. From bookstore to everything store

Amazon did not stay a bookstore for long. In the late 1990s it began selling music, films and toys, and in the 2000s it expanded into almost every kind of retail, from electronics to clothing to groceries. It also began to sell products for other sellers, taking a fee for letting them use its website and its warehouses. This marketplace model turned Amazon from a retailer into a platform, and it made the company the first place many shoppers looked when they wanted to buy something. In 2005 it launched Prime, a subscription service that offered free fast delivery and later added streaming video and music. In 2007 it launched the Kindle, an electronic reader that changed how books were sold and read. In 2017 it bought the grocery chain Whole Foods, giving it hundreds of physical stores for the first time.

The most important expansion, and the one that surprised the most people, was into cloud computing. In 2006 Amazon launched Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, which rented computing power and storage to other companies over the internet. The idea came from Amazon's own needs: the company had built a large computing infrastructure for its shops, and it realised that other companies would pay to use it. AWS grew into the largest cloud computing provider in the world, used by companies, governments and start-ups, and it became the most profitable part of Amazon. It also changed the technology industry: a small company could now rent the computing power of a giant, and it no longer needed to buy its own servers. Bezos has said that AWS was an example of the kind of invention he valued most: something that customers did not ask for, but that turned out to be essential.

By the time Bezos stepped down as chief executive in 2021, Amazon was one of the largest companies in the world, with more than a million employees and operations in dozens of countries. It had changed shopping, publishing, computing and logistics, and it had become part of the infrastructure of daily life, as familiar as the post office or the electricity grid. It had also become a subject of political debate, with critics arguing that it was too powerful and that it should be broken up or more heavily regulated. Bezos's achievement was to build a company that was both loved by its customers and feared by its competitors, and to do it in less than thirty years.

4. Blue Origin and the dream of space

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, six years after Amazon, and for many years it was a secretive project that few people outside the company knew about. He has said that his interest in space goes back to his childhood, when he watched the Apollo Moon landings on television, and that he believes humanity's future depends on moving heavy industry into space and preserving the Earth. Blue Origin's first product was New Shepard, a rocket and capsule designed to carry passengers on short flights that cross the edge of space, about a hundred kilometres up, and then return to Earth. The rocket lands vertically, so it can be used again, which was a key part of Bezos's plan to make spaceflight cheaper.

On 20 July 2021, two weeks after stepping down as Amazon's chief executive, Bezos flew on New Shepard himself, along with his brother Mark, an eighteen-year-old student and an eighty-two-year-old former pilot, Wally Funk. The flight lasted about ten minutes, and it made Bezos one of the first people to fly to space on a rocket built by his own company. It was a personal triumph, and it was also a publicity success, but it was criticised by some who said that a short flight was not real space travel and that the money would have been better spent on Earth. Bezos replied that space and Earth were not in competition, and that the work of Blue Origin was about the long-term future of humanity.

Blue Origin's larger rocket, New Glenn, made its first flight in January 2025, carrying a test payload into orbit. The rocket is designed to carry satellites and other cargo, and to compete with the rockets of SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk. The rivalry between Blue Origin and SpaceX has become one of the defining stories of the new space industry, with the two companies competing for contracts from the American space agency NASA and from commercial customers. In April 2025 Blue Origin flew its first all-female crew on New Shepard, including the singer Katy Perry and Bezos's fiancee Lauren Sánchez. As of November 2026, Blue Origin has not yet flown people to orbit, and its ambitions remain larger than its achievements, but it is one of only a few private companies in the world that can build and fly rockets.

5. The Washington Post, philanthropy and public life

In 2013 Bezos bought The Washington Post, one of America's most important newspapers, for a sum that was small compared with his fortune but large for a newspaper. The paper was losing money, and its owners, the Graham family, had decided to sell. Bezos said he would not interfere in its journalism, and he invested in its technology, helping it to grow its online readership. Under his ownership the Post won major journalism prizes and expanded its audience, but it also faced criticism, including from Bezos himself in later years, about its finances and its direction. In 2024 the paper's decision not to endorse a candidate in the presidential election led to resignations and to a public debate about its independence. Bezos defended the decision, saying that newspaper endorsements did not influence voters and that they damaged trust in the press. His critics said he was protecting his business interests.

Bezos's philanthropy has grown since he stepped down from Amazon. In 2020 he launched the Bezos Earth Fund, which supports work on climate change, including conservation, clean energy and food systems. He has also given money to early childhood education through the Bezos Day One Fund, and to a wide range of other causes. His giving has been criticised by some who say it is small compared with his wealth and that it is used to improve his public image, and praised by others who say it is focused on important problems and given without the conditions that some donors attach. He has not signed the Giving Pledge, the commitment by some leading philanthropists to give away most of their fortunes, and he has said that he finds it hard to give money away well.

His personal life has also been public. In 2019 he and MacKenzie Scott, his wife of twenty-five years, divorced, and she became a major philanthropist in her own right. He later began a relationship with Lauren Sánchez, a television presenter and pilot, and they married in Venice in June 2025, in a wedding that was widely covered and criticised by some residents of the city. He owns homes in several American cities, a large ranch in Texas, and a superyacht. He has said that he wants to be remembered for his work on Amazon and Blue Origin, and for his philanthropy, but his public image is also shaped by the way he lives, and by the contrast between his wealth and the working conditions of the people who made it.

6. The controversies: workers, tax and power

No account of Bezos or Amazon would be complete without the controversies, which are substantial and well documented. The most persistent criticism concerns the treatment of warehouse workers. Journalists and workers have reported high rates of injury, intense monitoring, and pressure to work at a pace that many find exhausting, and trade unions have tried, with limited success, to organise Amazon's warehouses. Amazon says that it pays well, that it invests in safety, and that its workers choose to work there. The debate has been running for years, and it has become a central part of the public argument about Amazon, with politicians and campaigners on both sides. In 2021 workers at a warehouse in Alabama voted against forming a union, and in 2022 workers at a warehouse in New York voted in favour, the first successful union vote at Amazon in the United States.

A second criticism concerns tax. Amazon has been accused of using legal structures to pay little tax in the countries where it operates, and of benefiting from tax rules that were not designed for online companies. The company says it pays all the tax it owes and that it follows the law. The issue has led to investigations and to changes in tax rules in several countries, and it remains a live political question. A third criticism concerns Amazon's power over smaller sellers and competitors. Sellers who use Amazon's marketplace say they depend on it and that the company can change its rules or promote its own products in ways that disadvantage them. Regulators in the United States and Europe have investigated these claims, and in 2023 the American Federal Trade Commission brought a case against the company, arguing that it had used its power unfairly. The case was still running in 2026, and Amazon denies the claims.

Bezos's supporters reply that Amazon's customers are happy, that its prices are low, that it has created a large number of jobs, and that its success is the result of better service rather than unfair practices. They also point out that Amazon's competitors include some of the largest companies in the world, and that the company faces intense competition in every market it operates in. The debate about Amazon is, in the end, a debate about what kind of economy the world wants: one in which a single company can become the infrastructure of shopping, or one in which that power is limited by law. Bezos himself has said that he expects Amazon to fail one day, and that the company's job is to delay that day for as long as possible. It is a striking remark from a founder, and it suggests that he understands the fragility of even the largest companies.

7. Legacy: the man who changed shopping

Jeff Bezos's legacy is the transformation of shopping, and of the infrastructure behind it. Before Amazon, buying a book meant going to a shop or ordering it by post, and buying almost anything else meant going to a shop. After Amazon, buying meant searching on a screen, clicking, and waiting for a parcel to arrive, often the next day. The change seems obvious now, but it required a huge investment in warehouses, delivery networks, computing and customer service, and it took a long time to become profitable. Bezos's contribution was to see the change coming, to invest in it for years before it paid off, and to build a company that could do it at a scale no one else could match. The result is that Amazon is now part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people, and its way of doing things has been copied by retailers around the world.

His second legacy is in cloud computing. AWS showed that a retailer could become a technology company, and it changed the economics of starting a business: a new company no longer needs to buy servers, and it can rent computing power by the hour. Many of the most successful technology companies of the last twenty years were built on AWS, and the cloud has become as important to the economy as electricity. Bezos did not invent cloud computing, but he was the first to build it at scale, and he understood earlier than most that it would become a business in its own right. It is a reminder that his talent was not just for retail but for seeing where technology was going and for building the infrastructure to get there.

His third legacy is in space, and it is the least certain. Blue Origin has not yet achieved what SpaceX has achieved, and it is not clear whether it will. But Bezos has committed himself to the idea that humanity's future lies beyond the Earth, and he has put his own money and reputation behind it. If Blue Origin succeeds, he will be remembered as one of the founders of the commercial space age. If it does not, he will be remembered as a man who spent a large part of his fortune on a dream that did not come true. Either way, his story is a reminder of how much a single person can change the world, and of how much depends on timing, persistence and the willingness to keep going when everyone else says to stop.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jeff Bezos
• Wikipedia — Jeff Bezos
• Biography.com — Jeff Bezos

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• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.