John Lennon

John Winston Ono Lennon, born on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital in Liverpool, England, was an English musician, activist, and Broadway composer. The only child of Alfred and Julia Lennon, he was named after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father, a merchant seaman of Irish descent, was absent at the time of his birth and later disappeared from the family entirely, leading Julia to give custody of Lennon to her sister, Mimi Smith, with whom he lived at 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton. Julia remained a presence in his life, visiting regularly and introducing him to Elvis Presley records, the banjo, and songs such as "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino.

Lennon attended Dovedale Primary School and later Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool from September 1952 to 1957. In 1956, Julia purchased him his first guitar, an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic, and that same year he formed a skiffle group called the Quarrymen. By 1960, that group had evolved into the Beatles, the band with which Lennon achieved global fame as founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist. He served as the group's de facto leader in its early years and developed a songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney that became the most successful in recorded history. Among the songs he wrote or co-wrote during this period, Lennon later cited "Strawberry Fields Forever" as his finest work with the band.

Beyond music, Lennon expanded into other creative fields during the 1960s. He appeared in the 1967 film How I Won the War and authored two books — In His Own Write, published in 1964, and A Spaniard in the Works, published in 1965 — both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. His song "All You Need Is Love" became an anthem of the anti-war movement and the broader counterculture of the decade.

In 1969, Lennon founded the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, and staged a two-week anti-war demonstration known as the bed-in for peace. He left the Beatles that year to pursue a solo career. His solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, was followed by a series of international top-ten singles, including "Give Peace a Chance," "Instant Karma!," "Imagine," and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)." He and Ono also collaborated on a trilogy of avant-garde albums and several films. After relocating to New York City in 1971, his public criticism of the Vietnam War prompted a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. During a period of separation from Ono between 1973 and 1975, he produced Harry Nilsson's album Pussy Cats and recorded chart-topping collaborations with Elton John on "Whatever Gets You thru the Night" and with David Bowie on "Fame."

Following a five-year hiatus from recording, Lennon returned in 1980 with Double Fantasy, a collaborative album with Ono. As a performer, writer, or co-writer, he accumulated 25 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Double Fantasy won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and that same year Lennon received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1997 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice — first as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and then as a solo artist in 1994. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and the 38th-greatest artist of all time, and in 2002 a BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons placed him eighth.

His Broadway credit is the show Lennon, for which he served as composer. Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman on 8 December 1980, three weeks after the release of Double Fantasy.