1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [126]
Terkel, Studs (1912– ) Terkel was born in New York City but grew up in Chicago. He was active during the Depression in the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and became a radio script writer and later a television personality on early Chicago television. It is, however, for his popular oral histories that he is best known—remarkable books compiled from interviews of mostly ordinary people. His best-known oral histories include Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and The Good War (1985), an oral history of World War II, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Thalberg, Irving (1899–1936) Sickly and frail, Thalberg worked with the brilliance and intensity of someone who knew he would die young. By the time he was 21, Thalberg was manager of Universal Pictures. Four years later, when MGM was formed, he was head of production and had authority to reedit any film. His management made MGM the most prestigious studio in the world, with such films as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937), and Camille (1937).
Tharp, Twyla (1941– ) Tharp studied at the American Ballet Theatre School and with Richard Thomas, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and others before joining the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1963 then forming her own company in 1965. As a choreographer, she created innovative dances, which, in contrast to much modern dance, were also laced with good humor.
Thomas, Clarence (1948– ) Born in rural Georgia, Thomas was raised by his grandfather, educated in Catholic schools, and received his law degree from Yale University in 1974. After working in the private sector and in government, he served as a justice on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from 1990 to 1991, when he was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Both Thomas and Marshall were black, but whereas Marshall (retiring for reasons of age and ill health) was a liberal, Thomas was a staunch conservative. His televised Senate confirmation hearing was bitter, marked by accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill, a former colleague. Thomas’ appointment shifted the Supreme Court toward conservatism.
Thompson, J. Walter (1847–1928) In 1868, Thompson went to work as a bookkeeper for William James Carlton, who sold advertising space in religious magazines. Thompson became an ad salesman for the company, which he purchased in 1877, renaming it the J. Walter Thompson Company. Whereas advertisers traditionally wrote their own ads, Thompson introduced professional copywriting and illustration, the twin cores of modern advertising. Thompson’s company was an advertising giant for more than a century.
Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862) In the 1830s, Thoreau fell under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and became his intellectual disciple, contributing to the magazine Emerson had started, The Dial. In 1845, Thoreau built a cabin on Walden Pond, two miles south of Concord, Massachusetts, on land owned by Emerson. He lived there alone, keeping a journal of his thoughts and observations in what became an experiment in stripping life to its essential core. He lived at the pond for two years, and in 1854 published Walden, a masterpiece of contemplative prose, which combined great nature writing with an internal record of Thoreau’s experiment in living. Although reclusive, Thoreau was hardly disengaged from society. In 1846, he was briefly jailed for failing to pay his poll tax. He declared that he could not support a government that would wage an unjust war on Mexico (U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848), and he wrote his most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which influenced generations of activists, from Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thorpe, Jim (1888–1953) A member of the Sauk and Fox tribe, Thorpe was twice on All-American football teams (1911 and 1912) and won the decathlon and the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, but was subsequently stripped of his gold medals because he had