J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling (born 1966) has sold more than a quarter-billion books from her series of novels about a British boy wizard named Harry Potter. With the wildly popular series--a seventh was announced late in 2006--Rowling singlehandedly revived the market for children's literature. The books, translated into more than 600 languages, spawned a sequence of worldwide box-office movie hits, and were credited with getting an entire generation of children raised on video games, television, and the Internet interested in reading again.

Born in 1966, in Chipping Sodbury, a small town in Bristol, England located a few miles south of Dursley, hometown to her fictional protagonist Harry Potter, Joanne Rowling was the daughter of a French-Scottish mother named Anne, and a Rolls Royce engineer father named Peter Rowling, who met on a train leaving King's Cross Station in London. She also has one older sister, Diana. In 1971, the Rowlings moved to nearby Winterbourne, in Bristol, and among the children's friends were Ian and Vikki Potter. Three years later, the family moved again, to Tutshill, near the border of Wales.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships. After two ill-fated affairs with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement; they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.

Luciano Pavarotti

Probably the most popular tenor since Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti (born 1935) combined accuracy of pitch and quality of sound production with a natural musicality. His favorite roles were Rodolfo in Puccini's La Bohème, Nemorino in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, and Riccardo in Verdi's Un Ballo Maschera.

Luciano Pavarotti was born on the outskirts of Modena in north-central Italy on October 12, 1935. Although he spoke fondly of his childhood, the family had little money; its four members were crowded into a two-room apartment. His father was a baker who, according to Pavarotti, had a fine tenor voice but rejected the possibility of a singing career because of nervousness. His mother worked in a cigar factory. World War II forced the family out of the city in 1943. For the following year they rented a single room from a farmer in the neighboring countryside, where young Pavarotti developed an interest in farming.

He gained worldwide notoriety in September of 1963, when he filled in for an ailing Giuseppe de Stefano in La Boheme at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. This experience led to his first appearances on television and a growing popularity. By the end of the year, he had sung in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. His performances got the attention of conductor Richard Bonynge, husband of the Australian opera singer Joan Sutherland. The exposure led Sutherland to ask Luciano Pavarotti to sing with her on a 14-week tour of Australia.

Pavarotti continued his notoriety in the role of Idamente in Mozart's Idomeneo at the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival. In February of 1965, he made his U.S. debut with Joan Sutherland in a performance of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. He also sang the role of Rodolfo at La Scala in Milan with his childhood friend Mirella Freni, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.

Pavarotti continued to sing La Boheme's Rodolfo, with appearances in San Francisco in 1967 and at New York's Metropolitan Opera (the "Met") in 1968. It became his signature role in the early years of his career.

Cal Ripken, Jr.

Calvin Edwin Ripken Jr. was born August 24, 1960, in Harve de Grace, Maryland. Baseball was in his blood--his dad, Cal Sr., was a minor league player in the Baltimore Oriole farm system. During Ripken's childhood his father spent 20 years as a minor league coach and manager before finally making the big leagues as a coach for the Orioles. His dad's job helped Cal Jr. choose a career. "From the time Cal Jr. was a little tyke," his mom, Vi, told Sports Illustrated, "all he ever wanted to be was a ballplayer." Ripken says his mom was even more important than his dad in encouraging him to play sports. "Everybody talks about how much of an influence my dad must have been on me, but the truth is I really didn't see that much of him at all," Ripken told Sports Illustrated. "When I look back on [my childhood], I really have to tip my hat to my mom. She took me to all of my games, congratulated me if I did well, consoled me [made me feel better] if I didn't." Since his dad didn't get to see many of Ripken's Little League games, it was his mother who taught her son how to hit.

Cal Ripken, Jr. holds many records in professional baseball, but it is his breaking of Lou Gehrig's record of 2,131 consecutive games played that especially endears him to his admirers, who call him the "Iron Man" of baseball. The perseverance, endurance and everyday work ethic that Ripken has exhibited throughout his 17 seasons with the Baltimore Orioles has made him one of the most popular professional athletes in all of sports.