PART TWO of a two-part profile. BILL RUSSELL could see that Celtics coach Red Auerbach knew the team’s personnel, maximized the strengths and minimized the weaknesses of each Celtic. Russell held off deciding Red was a friend, but in time they became dear friends, too, and Russell had very few…

Hundreds of NBA players have shot the basketball better than Bill Russell; a few have rebounded about as well; but no one has rebounded, blocked shots, changed shots, played total defense and won titles the way Russell did. He had more championship rings than fingers. …

ELIZABETH BISHOP was U.S. poet laureate in 1949–1950; won the a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a National Book Award in 1970. She was one of the great American poets of the 20th century — but she didn’t act like one. She was not a flamboyant or confessional writer and…

STUDS TERKEL, the oral historian, author, interviewer, broadcaster, jazz critic, scriptwriter, activist, actor and gadfly, was for a decades a Chicago institution, a scrappy, generous wise-cracking idealist proud of being streetwise, knowing all the angles. …

HARRIET TUBMAN, born in Dorchester County, Maryland in 1822, was a great and fearless emancipator of enslaved people, who undertook at least 13 dangerous liberating missions, brought about 80 enslaved people to freedom, and inspired hundreds of thousands more. She richly deserved the nickname William Lloyd Garrison gave her: “Moses.” …

JOHN SCANLON was a “crisis management expert,” a PR man, a “spin doctor.” A big-hearted, talkative, Irish-Catholic guy born in Manhattan in 1935 and raised near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, Scanlon was serious about his Irishness, his Catholicism and his work — but still kept a fine sense of…

VIVIAN GORNICK was born in the Bronx in 1935, raised there, earned degrees from City College and NYU, and worked for the Village Voice. I came across her work because she has important things to say about the memoir form. In 1987, she published her own memoir, “Fierce Attachments.” She…

BILLY JOEL, the rock and pop star, was born in 1949 as William Martin Joel and raised in Hicksville, Long Island. As a teenager, he was prone to depression, didn’t feel very handsome or musically gifted, but by 2022 he’d sold 160 million records, and was one of the richest…

ERICA JONG, the poet and novelist, published “Fear of Flying” in 1973, a book which broadened notions of what serious female novelists could write about, and which still sells steadily 49 years later. Columbia University has arranged to inherit Jong’s literary papers. …