James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, his works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not against art, but against human welfare."Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. H. L. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics, his gaudy heroes... chase dragons as stockbrockers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but once the artist creates his ideal world, he finds that it is made up of the same elements that make the real one. Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline, attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II. Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe".

Cabell was born into an affluent and well-connected Virginian family, lived most of his life in Richmond. The first Cabell settled in Virginia in 1664. Cabell County in West Virginia is named after the Governor. James Branch Cabell's grandfather, Robert Gamble Cabell, was a physician. James was the oldest of three boys—his brothers were Robert Gamble Cabell III and John Lottier Cabell, his parents separated and were divorced in 1907. His aunt was educationist Mary-Cooke Branch Munford. Although Cabell's surname is mispronounced "Ka-BELL", he himself pronounced it "CAB-ble." To remind an editor of the correct pronunciation, Cabell composed this rhyme: "Tell the rabble my name is Cabell." Cabell matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1894 at the age of fifteen and graduated in June 1898. While an undergraduate, Cabell taught Greek at the College. According to his close friend and fellow author Ellen Glasgow, Cabell developed a friendship with a professor at the college, considered by some to be "too intimate" and, as a result Cabell was dismissed, although he was subsequently readmitted and finished his degree.

Following his graduation, he worked from 1898 to 1900 as a newspaper reporter in New York City, but returned to Richmond in 1901, where he worked several months on the staff of the Richmond News.1901 was an eventful year for Cabell: his first stories were accepted for publication, he was suspected of the murder of John Scott, a wealthy Richmonder. It was rumored. Cabell's supposed involvement in the Scott murder and his college "scandal" were both mentioned in Ellen Glasgow's posthumously published autobiography The Woman Within. In 1902, seven of Cabell's first stories appeared in national magazines and over the next decade he wrote many short stories and articles, contributing to nationally published magazines including Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as carrying out extensive research on his family's genealogy. Between 1911 and 1913, he was employed by his uncle in the office of the Branch coal mines in West Virginia. On November 8, 1913, he married Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, a widow with five children from her previous marriage.

In 1915, son Ballard Hartwell Cabell was born. Priscilla died in March 1949. During his life, Cabell published fifty-two books, including novels, collections of short stories and miscellanea, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1937. Cabell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958 in Richmond, was buried in the graveyard of the Emmanuel Church at Brook Hill; the following year the remains of his first wife were reinterred in Hollywood Cemetery. Significant Cabell collections are housed at various repositories, including Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia. In 1970, Virginia Commonwealth University located in Richmond, named its main campus library "James Branch Cabell Library" in his honor. In the 1970s, Cabell's personal library and personal papers were moved from his home on Monument Avenue to the James Branch Cabell Library. Consisting of some 3,000 volumes, the collection includes manuscripts; the collection resides in the Special Archives department of the library.

The VCU undergraduate literary journal at the university is named Poictesme after the fictional province in his cycle Biography of the Life of Manuel. More VCU spent over $50 million to expand and modernize the James Branch Cabell Library to further entrench it as the premier library in the Greater Richmond Area and one of the top landmark libraries in the United States. In 2016 Cabell Library won the New Landmark Library Award; the Library Journal's website provides a virtual walking tour of the new James Branch Cabell Library. Cabell's best-known book, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, was the subject of a cel

She Who Must Be Obeyed is a minimalist sculpture 33 feet wide and 16 feet deep made by Tony Smith in 1975. It is located at the Frances Perkins Building, in downtown, Washington, D. C.. The piece consists of nine geometric rhomboid units and welded together and painted blue. Tony Smith's career encompassed architecture and sculpture; the General Services Administration commissioned the 21-foot-high steel construction, painted blue in 1974 for its Art in Public Places program. Smith said. "I felt honored to do something in the national capital... As far as I was concerned, I would be willing to supply it at cost….it’s right near the Capitol, it’s a nice place to be." The $98,000 fee he was awarded was consumed by the production of the imposing work. During the spring of 1976 She Who Must Be Obeyed was installed on the east plaza of the newly constructed Department of Labor building—subsequently named the Frances Perkins Building—in Washington, D. C. not far from the east wing of the National Gallery of Art.

Using the jargon of a master builder, which he had been, Smith explained that his sculpture “is the cross-section of a space frame made up of tetrahedral and octahedral. It’s called a rhombus.”For various reasons She never became one of the artist's better-known sculptures. One possible reason: until 2009 it was not easy to see She; the work was placed in an outdoor corner of the t-shaped Frances Perkins Building near Second Street NW, set back—and difficult to see—from the street. Access to the work was made easier after it was restored in 2008–2009, reinstalled on the other side of the Perkins Building, on a grassy plaza close to the intersection of Third and C Streets NW; the construction is an anomaly in the artist's career: instead of being painted black like most of Smith's other works, or yellow, like a select few, it is bright blue. The artist had wanted She to be the color of pool cue chalk. In comparison to the artworks published in the pages of the Museum of Modern Art catalogue that accompanied the retrospective curated by Robert Storr in 1998, it is reproduced in black and white, not color.

Because Tony Smith's early structures, works like Die and The Elevens Are Up, were monochromatic, smooth-surfaced, straight-edged, the older artist was referred to, during this phase of his career, as a Minimalist. His closest friends and colleagues, included Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, his work straddles both genres. Smith had an open-ended approach to titling his art; some shapes reminded him of specific objects. With its horn-like appendages, Moses refers to Michelangelo's version of the patriarch; because he was well read, had run a secondhand bookstore during the Depression, a number of the artist's sculptures have literary monikers. Gracehoper, for example, appears in James Joyce's Modernist classic, she Who Must Be Obeyed derives from a more populist source, the 1886–1887 novel She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard, a tale of a lost kingdom. List of public art in Washington, D. C. Ward 6 List of Tony Smith sculptures dcMemorials. "She Who Must be Obeyed sculpture in Washington, D.

C." dcMemorials. Retrieved June 8, 2010. "In This Case: Tony Smith". Smithsonian American Art Museum. June 5, 2007

Albert Sterner was an American illustrator and painter. Sterner was born in London, attended King Edward's School, Birmingham. After a brief period in Germany, he studied drawing in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger, he moved to the United States in 1879 to join his family who had moved to Chicago. His brother was the architect Frederick Sterner, who had a career in Chicago and Denver before joining his brother in New York, he began doing lithography and illustrations. He opened a studio in New York in 1885 and began doing illustrations for magazines including Harper's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, The Century Magazine, Collier's. In 1888 he became a student at Académie Julian in Paris, he returned to the United States in 1918. In 1918, he began teaching at the Art Students League in New York. Institutions that have exhibited his work include the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Carnegie Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago. Sterner's awards include the Carnegie Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1941.

His New York Times obituary stated that he was best known for his portraits, but "he was noted for his nudes, religious subjects, still-life work and, in his earlier days, his book and magazine illustrations." Elizabeth Cady Stanton Blake Jacob Burck E. Charlton Fulton Flint, Ralph. Albert Sterner: his life and his art Works by Albert Sterner at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Albert Sterner at Internet Archive