persistence
Kept going when the world said stop, and was usually right.
What For
In 1926 a twenty-year-old swam the English Channel faster than any man alive — and her trainer spent the worst hour of it begging her to quit.
The Soot and the Spit
What does a self-taught artist do when the family finally retires the wood stove and his only source of ink disappears?
The World's Best Loser
A Glasgow grocer spent thirty-one years and five yachts chasing the same silver cup, and lost every single race.
The Abbess Who Hid the Grave
What does a twelfth-century abbess do when an archbishop orders her to exhume a body she has decided to keep?
The Painter Who Painted the Room
She started on Masonite, then cookie sheets, then scallop shells, then the breadbox — and then she ran out of small things.
The Man Who Was Grimaldi
What does it cost a man to teach the world how to fall down for a living?
The Code That Wasn't
For decades scholars thought a Swiss novelist's tiny notebooks were a secret code written from inside an asylum.
The Man Who Saw With His Ears
What does geometry sound like when you can only hear it described?
The Clockmaker Who Retuned the Universe
What does an 82-year-old who just solved the longitude problem do for an encore?
The Queen's Poet
What do you do when a voice in your head orders you to write, the verse is catastrophic, and the Queen's polite rejection reads, to you, like a coronation?
The Surgeon Who Wouldn't Give It Back
She was exchanged man-for-man for a Confederate major, and that wasn't even the strangest thing about her wedding.
Prizes Are For Boys
What does it take to invent modern estate planning, compose polytonal symphonies on weekends, and then leave a Pulitzer-winning piece in a drawer for thirty-six years?