de Kooning, Willem (b. April 24, 1904, Rotterdam, Neth.—d. March 19, 1997, East Hampton, N.Y., U.S.) Dutch-born U.S. painter. He stud¬ ied art in Rotterdam and entered the U.S. as a stowaway in 1926. Settling in Hoboken, N.J., he supported himself as a house painter before moving to New York City, where he came under the influence of Arshile Gorky. He supported himself by working for the WPA Federal Art Project. In the 1930s and ’40s his work was both figurative and abstract; the two ten¬ dencies eventually fused in images that combined biomorphic and geo¬ metric shapes. In the 1940s he became one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism and particularly of action painting. Among his best- known works is a series of deliberately vulgar images of women done with roughly applied pigment and raw colours (e.g., Woman /, 1950-52; Woman and Bicycle, 1953). In 1963 he moved to East Hampton; in his later years he produced clay sculpture that was cast into bronze.
de la Mare, Walter (John) (b. April 25, 1873, Charlton, Kent, Eng.—d. June 22, 1956, Twickenham, Middlesex) British poet and nov¬ elist. De la Mare was of French Huguenot descent. He was educated in London and worked for the Standard Oil Co. (1890-1908) before turn¬ ing to writing, initially under the pseudonym Walter Ramal. He wrote for both adults and children. His collection Come Hither (1923) was espe¬ cially highly praised. Memoirs of a Midget (1921) was his best-known novel. His Collected Stories for Children appeared in 1947.
de la Renta, Oscar (b. July 22, 1932, Santo Domingo, Dorn.Rep.) Dominican-born U.S. fashion designer. After studies in Santo Domingo and Madrid, he became staff designer for Cristobal Balenciaga in Madrid. He moved to New York City in 1962 and started his own company to produce women’s ready-to-wear fashions. In 1973 he founded Oscar de la Renta Couture and expanded into household linens, menswear, and perfumes. In the 1970s he introduced the ethnic look with “Gypsy” and Russian themes; more recently he has produced romantic evening clothes in taffeta, chiffon, velvet, brocade, and fur. From 1993 to 2002 he designed couture for the house of Pierre Balmain.
de la Roche Vdo-la-'roshX, Mazo (b. Jan. 15, 1879, Newmarket, Ont., Can.—d. July 12, 1961, Toronto) Canadian author. She is best known for a series of novels centred on the Whiteoak family of Jalna, an estate in her native Ontario. These sagas of the family’s history, more popular in the U.S. and Europe than in Canada, were the basis of a film, Jalna (1935), and a play, Whiteoaks (1936). She also wrote children’s stories, travel books, drama, and an autobiography.
De La Warr Vde-b-.warX, Thomas West, 12th Baron or Baron Delaware (b. July 9, 1577—d. June 7, 1618, at sea off the coast of Virginia or New England) English founder of Virginia. After serving under the earl of Essex in the Netherlands and Ireland, he became a member of the Virginia Company and was appointed governor of the colony in 1610. He and 150 settlers arrived at Jamestown as another group was abandon¬ ing it. He established two forts at the mouth of the James River and rebuilt Jamestown. Delaware Bay, the Delaware River, and the state of Delaware were named for him.
De Laurentiis \da-laii-'ren-tes,\ English V.de-lor-'en-shosV Dino (b. Aug. 8, 1919, Torre Annunziata, Italy) Italian-U.S. film producer. He pro¬ duced his first film at age 20 and scored his first hit with Bitter Rice (1948). He formed a joint production company with Carlo Ponti and produced films such as Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954, Academy Award) and The Nights of Cabiria (1956, Academy Award). In the early 1960s he built a studio, Dinocitta, where he made several epics; their lack of success forced him to sell the studio in the early 1970s. He then moved to the U.S., where he produced films such as Serpico (1973), Ragtime (1981), and Hannibal (2001).
De Leon, Daniel (b. Dec. 14, 1852, Curasao, Netherlands Antilles—d. May 11, 1914, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Dutch-born U.S. socialist. Arriv¬ ing in the U.S. in 1874, he joined joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1890 and soon became one of its leaders. Finding the labour-union leadership insufficiently radical, he led a faction that seceded from the Knights of Labor in 1895, later forming the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA). In 1905 he helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which absorbed the STLA. In 1908 he was refused a seat at the IWW convention by extremists who rejected political activity of the sort
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he advocated and who favoured more violent tactics. He then created the unsuccessful Workers’ International Industrial Union.
de Man Xdo-'manV Paul (b. Dec. 6, 1919, Antwerp, Belg.—d. Dec. 21, 1983, New Haven, Conn., U.S.) Belgian-born U.S. literary critic. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1947, attended Harvard University, and in 1970 joined the faculty at Yale University, where he remained the rest of his life. His groundbreaking Blindness and Insight (1971) made Yale the American centre for deconstructive literary criticism (see deconstruction). His other works include Allegories of Reading (1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), and Aesthetic Ideology (1988). His reputation was undermined with the posthumous revelation of his wartime anti-Semitic writings for the pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper Le Soir.
de Mille \da-'mil\, Agnes (George) (b. Sept. 18, 1905, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Oct. 7, 1993, New York City) U.S. dancer and choreog¬ rapher. She graduated from UCLA, moved back to New York, and soon was touring the U.S. with her own mime-dance concerts (1929-40). In her choreographed works for Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), she made innovative use of American themes, folk dances, and idioms; in Rodeo (1942) she used tap dance for the first time in a ballet. She cho¬ reographed many Broadway musicals, including Oklahoma! (1943), Car¬ ousel (1945), Brigadoon (1947), and Paint Your Wagon (1951), and she wrote several books on dance and an autobiography.
De Niro \d9-'nir-o\, Robert (b. Aug. 17, 1943, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. film actor. He made his debut in 1968 and played in minor films until his critically acclaimed performance in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). He starred in Mean Streets (1973) and other films directed by Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980, Acad¬ emy Award), and GoodFellas (1990). Noted for his intensely committed performances, he also starred in The Godfather, Part II (1974, Academy Award), The Deer Hunter (1978), Once upon a Time in America (1984), Heat (1997), and Meet the Parents (2000). He directed his first film, A Bronx Tale, in 1993.
De Quincey, Thomas (b. Aug. 15, 1785, Manchester, Lancashire, Eng.—d. Dec. 8, 1859, Edinburgh, Scot.) English essayist and critic. While a student at Oxford he first took opium to relieve the pain of facial neuralgia. He became a lifelong addict, an experience that inspired his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), whose highly poetic and imaginative prose has made it an enduring masterpiece of English style. As a critic he is best known for the essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823).
De Sica Xdo-'se-koV, Vittorio (b. July 7, 1901, Sora, Italy—d. Nov. 13, 1974, Paris, France) Italian film director and actor. He joined an acting company in 1923 and soon became a matinee idol. He appeared on screen as a leading man in a series of light comedies, and he excelled in a dra¬ matic role in Roberto Rossellini’s General della Rovere (1959). He directed his first film in 1940 and, working with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, made a major contribution to the Neorealism of the postwar Italian cin¬ ema with Shoeshine (1946, Academy Award) and The Bicycle Thief ( 1948, Academy Award). His later films include Umberto D. (1952), Two Women (1961), Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963, Academy Award), and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971, Academy Award).