He was a school dropout at 14 and homeless for a spell, but as a driven investor he became a billionaire. Later came another quest:…

Beginning with a reading by Dylan Thomas, she and a friend found unlikely commercial success in the 1950s with recordings of famous writers reciting their…

Joining a pantheon of management thinkers, he embraced a humanistic path for business and foresaw outsourcing, remote work and a gig economy.

He was the first African American to become president of a large white university, C.E.O. of a major corporation and deputy secretary of state.

In 1978 he came up with the idea of a warehouselike store that would appeal to the do-it-yourself homeowner. The chain became the world’s largest…

She came up with a method of automation so that workers would not have to make the bags by hand. Then she fought for credit…

Over four decades, he and his colleague James B. Steele at The Philadelphia Inquirer gained renown for resourceful, often explosive investigative journalism.

Hailing from a musical family, she won Grammys, sang backup to Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin and helped shepherd Whitney Houston to superstardom.

It cost $18,000 when it was introduced in 1965, but it bridged the world between room-size mainframes and the modern desktop.

Though he was the company’s president, he opted for joint leadership with family members as they turned a string of shoe stores into an international…