Carl Sagan

(1934 - 1996)

Growing up in New York City, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan developed a fascination with outer space at the age of five. “The sun and the moon seemed perfectly right for Brooklyn,” he said in 1976, a year before winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Dragons of Eden, “but the stars were different. I had the sense of something interesting, distant, strange about them.” He went to the University of Chicago at age sixteen, and spent most of his career at Cornell University, after Harvard did not grant him tenure.