Ethel Waters October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977 Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, and married at the age of 13, Ethel Waters overcame a childhood of abuse and poverty to become a jazz and gospel singer and actress, with a career spanning five decades. Waters toured on the black vaudeville circuit until 1919, when she moved to Harlem, and began her recording career.

Ethel Waters October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977 In 1929, she recorded “Am I Blue,” which became a hit, and her signature song. Her film career began the same year, but she is best known for her Academy Award-nominated role in Pinky (1949), and for the 1952 film reprisal of her NY Drama Critics Circle Award-winning performance (1950) in A Member of the Wedding. She was the second African-American to be nominated for an Academy Award, and the first African-American woman to be nominated for an Emmy (1962) for her performance in Route 66. On Jan. 8, 1954, Waters was interviewed in this house by Edward R. Murrow for his live television show "Person to Person," which focused on the careers, as well as personal lives, of celebrities.

Richard Wright Sept. 4, 1908 - Nov. 28, 1960 Grandson of slaves and son of a sharecropper who abandoned him, Mississippi-born Wright moved to Chicago in 1927, and ten years later to New York. Here he befriended Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), and became Harlem editor of the Daily Worker.

Richard Wright Sept. 4, 1908 - Nov. 28, 1960 From this house in 1938, he often went to Fort Greene Park to jot notes for his novel, Native Son (1940). Indescribing the theme, Wright said: "Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as from a lack of bread." The novel, the first work of an African American author selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, was adapted as a play directed by Orson Welles (1941). Among his other books are Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Black Boy(1945). Wright and his family moved to Paris as expatriates in 1946; where he died in 1960, and was interred at PèreLachaise cemetery.

Henry Miller 1891-1980 Raised in Brooklyn, the best-selling author is noted for his imaginative, controversial novels Tropic of Cancer (1934), which chronicles his colorful life as an expatriate in Paris, and Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which depicts his adult life in New York City.

Henry Miller 1891-1980 Both Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn were banned in the U.S. until 1961. Miller lived here from 1924 to 1925.