English Imre Kertész was born in Budapest on November 9, 1929. Of Jewish descent, in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. On his return to Hungary he worked for a Budapest newspaper, Világosság, but was dismissed in 1951 when it adopted the Communist party…

My grandfather, Harlow Shapley, was a noted astronomer. He worked at the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson in Pasadena, California, where he did some important work, most notably determining that the sun was not located at the center of the galaxy, but rather, out on the fringes. His first three children were born in Pasadena,…

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 16, 1923, the only child of Joel and Sylvia Miller. My father, an attorney, was a graduate of Harvard University (A.B. 1916) and in that one respect, at least, I followed in his footsteps, entering Harvard in 1940 and graduating in 1943 (A.B., magna cum laude, Class…

Robert Bárány was born on April 22, 1876, in Vienna. His father was the manager of a farm estate and his mother, Maria Hock, was the daughter of a well-known Prague scientist, and it was her intellectucal influence that was most pronounced in the family. Robert was the eldest of six children. When he was…

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov was born on May 15, 1845*, in a village near Kharkov in Russia (now Kharkiv, Ukraine). He was the son of an officer of the Imperial Guard, who was a landowner in the Ukraine steppes. His mother, née Nevakhowitch, was of Jewish origin. Mechnikov went to school at Kharkoff and was, even…

My beginning as a legally recognized individual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Bluefield Sanitarium, a hospital that no longer exists. Of course I can’t consciously remember anything from the first two or three years of my life after birth. (And, also, one suspects, psychologically, that the earliest memories have…

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Transkei, South Africa on July 18, 1918. His father was Hendry Mphakanyiswa of the Tembu Tribe. Mandela himself was educated at University College of Fort Hare and the University of Witwatersrand where he studied law. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance against…

I was born on October 21, 1957, in Heidelberg, a small town in Germany with a charming old city and a famous castle. My parents had come to Heidelberg after the second world war, when many people relocated within Germany searching for better economic opportunities. My mother’s parents were farmers in Silesia, which has now…

I was born in Japan on August 3, 1959. My natural mother died one month after I was born, apparently due to giving birth at an advanced age. Because my father was also physically frail, I was brought up by my uncle and aunt. When I use the words “father” and “mother” now, I am…

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, situated in a tropical region of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. He grew up with his maternal grandparent – his grandfather was a pensioned colonel from the civil war at the beginning of the century. He went to…