Jack London

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and... beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, amor fati, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.
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Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most... notable being The Communist Manifesto and Capital ; some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels. Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books.
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Ouida was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé . Ramé was born in Bury St. Edmunds, England, to a Guernsey-born French-speaking father and an English mother. She derived her pen name from her own childish pronunciation of her given name "Louise". Her opinion of her... birthplace fluctuated; in one of her books she states During her career, she wrote more than 40 novels, children's books and collections of short stories and essays. She was an animal lover and rescuer, and at times owned as many as thirty dogs. For many years she lived in London, but about 1874 she moved to Italy, where she remained until her death in 1908. Ouida's work had several successive phases during her career. Her first novel, Held in Bondage was published in 1863, when she was 24. In her early period, her novels were considered "racy" and "swashbuckling", a contrast to "the moralistic prose of early Victorian literature" comprising a hybrid of the sensationalism of the 1860s and the proto-adventure novels that were being published in part as a romanticisation of imperial expansion.
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Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist , known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Huxley's famous 1860 debate with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Huxley had been planning to... leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated whether humans were closely related to apes. Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. He was instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, and fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition. In 1869 Huxley coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his own views on theology, a term whose use has continued to the present day . Huxley had little formal schooling and taught himself almost everything he knew.
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