1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [20]
Cassady, Neal (1926–1968) Cassady never wrote a novel or a poem, but he was a driving force behind the “Beat Generation” of writers during the 1950s and early 1960s, figuring as a principal character in the novel Go (1952) by John Clellon Holmes, considered the first work of “Beat” literature, and in the most famous Beat novel, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), as well as other works. He had been raised by an alcoholic father on Denver’s skid row and grew into a thief and con artist. He met Kerouac and the poet Alan Ginsberg in 1946 and served as the subject-catalyst for them and their circle—the embodiment of the sensitive outlaw spirit, born of America, yet apart from it. He died of exposure and acute alcoholic intoxication in Mexico in 1968.
Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926) Born in Pittsburgh, Cassatt was tutored privately in art in Philadelphia and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1861 to 1865, then studied in Europe. She became associated with the French Impressionist school and first exhibited—with great success—at the Paris Salon of 1872. Cassatt is best known for her magnificent and much-loved depictions of mothers and children.
Cather, Willa (1873–1947) Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family at age nine to frontier Nebraska, where she imbibed the life of the immigrant settlers of the Great Plains. She graduated from the University of Nebraska and made her way as a journalist, then earned her first literary fame with stories from the Nebraska frontier, O, Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918). Her 1922 One of Ours was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Catt, Carrie Chapman (1859–1947) Successor to Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Catt was a brilliant and inspiring organizer, who mounted the culminating public campaign that finally achieved passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote in America.
Chambers, Whittaker (1901–1961) Born Jay Vivian Chambers in Philadelphia, this left-wing journalist took his mother’s maiden name, Whittaker, in the 1920s. In August 1948, he testified to a committee of Congress that State Department official Alger Hiss had been a fellow member of a Communist spy ring in Washington, D.C., during the 1930s. The accusation and the Hiss trial that followed became the focal points of an American “red scare” that persisted through the mid 1950s, brought the anti-Communist “witch hunts” of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and precipitated the rise of then-Congressman Richard M. Nixon.
Champlain, Samuel de (1567–1635) Champlain is generally acknowledged as the founder of Quebec and, in what is now the United States, explored widely in northern New York and the eastern Great Lakes. He did much to develop the French fur trade in eastern North America and generally to consolidate French holdings in the New World. New York’s Lake Champlain is named in his honor.
Channing, William Ellery (1780–1842) A Congregationalist minister, Channing founded Unitarianism, a liberal take on Christianity that advocated a rational approach to Scripture and religious belief. Linked to this was Channing’s advocacy of Transcendentalism, a philosophy whose most famous exponent was Ralph Waldo Emerson and that proposed the essential unity of all creation and the innate goodness of humankind. Channing exerted a profound influence over 19th-century American religion, philosophy, and literature.
Chanute, Octave (1832–1910) Born in Paris, Chanute was brought to the United States as a child. He was a civil engineer most of his life, but during his sixties set up a glider camp on the shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago, where he and colleagues made over 2,000 flights in gliders of Chanute’s design. Chanute and his work had a