Dramatic Episodes of Youthful Accomplishment

Before they reached the age of twenty, the young people in this book had already earned themselves places in history. Although their accomplishments were widely divergent, each individual deserves to be well remembered because of his outstanding contribution to the world.

ARTURO TOSCANINI was a cellist, just out of the Parma Conservatory, when he was called upon to conduct the orchestra of a traveling opera company. This was the beginning of a sixty-eight-year career which made musical history.

WERNHER VON BRAUN attended his classes at the Technical University of Berlin, but spent the rest of his time at the launching site of the Society for Space Travel. A successful launching proved that rockets could lead the way to outer space and made scientific history.

SAM COLT, like many a New England lad, went away to sea. An outmoded gun he saw in a far-off port inspired him to whittle a model of his famed six-shooter. Then, with Yankee ingenuity he financed his invention and made mechanical history.

LOUIS BRAILLE was only fifteen when he invented a system by which blind people like himself might learn to read and write. Those who use his system today agree that he made educational history.

BABE DIDRIKSON ZAHARIAS won the right to be called the woman athlete of all time when she won the Women's Track and Field Championships, competing as a one-girl team. She broke record after record and wrote her name in athletic history.

GALILEO GALILEI dared to question accepted truths taught him by his university professors, and by using experimental methods proved some wrong. His discovery of the principle of the pendulum was a major step in the history of dynamics.

GILBERT DE LAFAYETTE, a very rich aristocrat, had been unsuccessful in all he attempted until he sneaked out of France to join the American War for Independence. As he distinguished himself on the battlefield, he gained the respect of the world and made political history.

EDNA ST.VINCENT MILLAY often lay atop a mountain near her girlhood home in Camden, Maine. Some of the thoughts and experiences she collected there she turned into "Renascence", her most famous poem and one which made literary history.

The biographical stories in this book, with their dramatic episodes set against informative historical backgrounds, are based on authentic facts and always true to the spirit of the times and circumstances in which the eight young people lived.

From the dust jacket