self-taught
No degree, no teacher, no permission — just the work.
The Hatchery Sessions
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
The Guest of Honor
What does it take for a toll collector who painted tigers in his off-hours to end up enthroned on a packing crate at a banquet thrown by Picasso?
The Weatherman Was Wrong Again
For ten years, a Chicago dishwasher kept a secret diary grading the local weatherman against reality.
Play a Strawberry
Who feeds a band one cup of soybeans a day for a month and calls it rehearsal?
The Rubber Man
The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent $30,000 he didn't have to build a palace of rubber furniture inside a building made of glass.
The Birthday Cake
A deaf arithmetic teacher in a Kaluga log cabin derived the rocket equation between marking schoolboys' sums, and kept a trapdoor in his ceiling his family called the door to outer space.
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 Accountant of Skt.-Adolf-Wald
Issued one pencil a week, he spent thirty-five years balancing the ledgers of a universe he'd crowned himself emperor of.
The Farmer Who Did Not Know
He showed up in overalls and gumboots, removed his dentures, and asked if he could run.
The Man Who Knew Paris
He kept a shoebox labeled Mouse Material; the archivist who finally opened it found the contents of a vacuum cleaner.
The Man Who Sewed Up a Heart
What happens when a former barber decides to stitch a beating heart by lamplight, twelve years after the most famous surgeon on Earth said it couldn't be done?