Get to Know Biographies

As a child he was labeled as slow. He clerked in a village grocery store. He suggested putting slow- moving merchandise on a counter and selling it for five cents. This venture was so successful that it was continued with new goods. He became the principal founder of a chain of five and ten cent stores.

• F.W. Woolworth

• Winston Churchill

• Abraham Lincoln

• Isaac Newton

When he was 12 years- old, he could not read, and he remained deficient in reading all his life. However, he could memorize entire lectures which was how he got through school. He became a famous general during WW II.

• Winston Churchill

• Nelson Rockefeller

• George Patton

• Nicola Tesla

He was slow in school work and did not have a successful school experience, but later became a well- known movie producer and cartoonist.

• Pablo Neruda

• William Shakespeare

• Roald Dahl

• Walt Disney

Until he was 18, ... read virtually nothing but comic books but did show his writing skills. He sold one-liners for ten cents each to gossip columnists.

• Walt Disney

• Woody Allen

• Richard Nixon

• Quentin Tarantino

...taught herself to play the piano at only four years old!

• Anne Frank

• Lady Gaga

• Emily Dickinson

• Madonna

This young boy had difficulty reading but was able to write some of the world's best loved stories.

• Roald Dahl

• Charles Dickens

• Hans Christian Anderson

• J.R.R. Tolkien

..., who twice won the Nobel Prize, and discovered radium, was not allowed to become a member of the prestigious French Academy because she was a woman.

• Marie Curie

• Rachel Carson

• Grace Hoper

• Amelia Earhart

Before she was the diva we know now, she was just a 7-year-old girl with a dream to become a performer, but rejected for her school choir owing to her strong trademark vibrato.

• Madonna

• Shakira

• Adele

• Rihanna

She had a childhood fraught with poverty: she lived with her maternal grandmother for about six months while her mother worked, and circumstances were so dismal that she wore potato sacks for clothes – something the local children mocked her for. Through sheer will-power and determination, she became the first African-American woman to become a billionaire.

• Whitney Houston

• Aretha Franklin

• Michelle Obama

• Oprah Winfrey

She was so poor that during the writing of her first book, she couldn’t afford to get the novel photocopied, much less buy a computer. And so she manually typed out each copy, sending them to prospective publishers, all of whom rejected it, until Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave the book a second chance after the CEO’s 8-year-old daughter became absolutely thrilled by it.

• Agatha Christie

• J. K. Rowling

• Virginia Woolf

• Jane Austen