Problem: Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin (May 10, 1894 - November 11, 1979) was a Russian-born American film composer and conductor. Classically trained in St. Petersburg, Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, he moved to Berlin and then New York City after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, after the stock market crash, he moved to Hollywood, where he became best known for his scores for Western films, including Duel in the Sun, Red River, High Noon, The Big Sky, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Last Train from Gun Hill. Tiomkin received twenty-two Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars, three for Best Original Score for High Noon, The High and the Mighty, and The Old Man and the Sea, and one for Best Original Song for "The Ballad of High Noon" from the former film.

Tiomkin received his first break from Columbia director Frank Capra, who picked him to write and perform the score for Lost Horizon (1937). The film gained significant recognition for Tiomkin in Hollywood. It was released the same year that he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.  In his autobiography, Please Don't Hate Me! (1959), Tiomkin recalls how the assignment by Capra forced him to first confront a director in a matter of music style:  [H]e gave me the job without reservation. I could write the score without interference, and he would hear it when it was done. Lost Horizon offered me a superb chance to do something big... I thought I might be going a little too far in the matter of expense, and went to Frank one day as he sat in the projection room [and explained the score.]... He looked shocked. "No, Dimi, the lama is a simple man. His greatness is in being simple. For his death the music should be simple, nothing more than the muttering rhythm of a drum." "But Frank, death of lama is not ending one man, but is death of idea. Is tragedy applying to whole human race. I must be honest. Music should rise high, high. Should give symbolism of immense loss. Please don't hate me."  He worked on other Capra films during the following decade, including the comedy You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). During World War II, he continued his close collaboration with Capra by composing scores for his Why We Fight series. These seven films were commissioned by the U.S. government to show American soldiers the reason for United States participation in the war. They were later released to the general U.S. public to generate support for American involvement.  Tiomkin credited Capra for broadening his musical horizons by shifting them away from a purely Eurocentric and romantic style to a more American style based on subject matter and story.

Was It's a Wonderful Life the last movie he did with Capra?

Answer with quotes: and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).


Problem: Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 - October 7, 1992) was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojeve. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom studied and taught in Paris (1953-55) at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States in 1955, he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom went on to teach at Yale from 1960 to 1963, at Cornell until 1970, and at the University of Toronto until 1979, when he returned to the University of Chicago. Among Bloom's former students are prominent journalists, government officials and political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kraynak, Pierre Hassner, Clifford Orwin, Janet Ajzenstat, John Ibbitson, and John Milligan-Whyte.  In 1963, as a Professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, an organization focused on intellectual development and self-governance. The students received free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell University campus and assumed the management of the house themselves. While living at the house, Bloom befriended former U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Bloom's first book was a collection of three essays on Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare's Politics; it included an essay from Harry V. Jaffa. He translated and commented upon Rousseau's "Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater", bringing it into dialogue with Plato's Republic. In 1968, he published his most significant work of philosophical translation and interpretation, a translation of Plato's Republic. Bloom strove to achieve "translation... for the serious student". The preface opens on page xi with the statement, "this is intended to be a literal translation". Although the translation is not universally accepted, Bloom said he always conceptualized the translator's role as a matchmaker between readers and the texts he translated. He repeated this effort as a professor of political science at the University of Toronto in 1978, translating Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. Among other publications during his years of teaching was a reading of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, titled "Giants and Dwarfs"; it became the title for a collection of essays on, among others, Raymond Aron, Alexandre Kojeve, Leo Strauss, and liberal philosopher John Rawls. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal Political Theory as well as a contributor to History of Political Philosophy (edited by Joseph Cropsey and Leo Strauss).  After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with Saul Bellow. In 1987 Bellow wrote the Preface to The Closing of the American Mind.  Bloom's last book, which he dictated while in the hospital dying, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship, an offering of interpretations on the meaning of love. There is an ongoing controversy over Bloom's semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating--as in Saul Bellow's thinly fictionalized account in Ravelstein--in his death in 1992 from AIDS. Bloom's friends do not deny his homosexuality, but whether he actually died of AIDS remains disputed.

Did he have any other awards or recognition?

Answer with quotes:
Among Bloom's former students are prominent journalists, government officials and political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kraynak, Pierre Hassner, Clifford Orwin, Janet Ajzenstat, John Ibbitson, and John Milligan-Whyte.