George Orwel

The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical drama film directed by Gabriele Muccino and starring Will Smith as Chris Gardner, a homeless salesman. Smith's son Jaden Smith co-stars, making his film debut as Gardner's son, Christopher Jr. The screenplay by Steven Conrad is based on the best-selling 2006 memoir of the same name written by Gardner with Quincy Troupe. It is based on Gardner's nearly one-year struggle being homeless. The unusual spelling of the film's title comes from a mural that Gardner sees on the wall outside the daycare facility his son attended. The movie is set in San Francisco in 1981. The film was released on December 15, 2006, by Columbia Pictures, and received moderately positive reviews, with Smith’s performance and the emotional weight of the story garnering universal acclaim. Smith was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Actor. In 1981, San Francisco salesman Chris Gardner invests his entire life savings in portable bone-density scanners, which he demonstrates to doctors and pitches as a handy improvement over standard X-rays. The scanners play a vital role in Chris's life. While he is able to sell most of them, the time lag between the sales and his growing financial demands enrage his wife, Linda, who works as a hotel maid. The economic instability increasingly erodes their marriage, despite caring for Christopher Jr., their soon-to-be five-year-old son. While Chris is trying to sell one of the scanners, he meets Jay Twistle, a lead manager and partner for Dean Witter Reynolds, and impresses him by solving a Rubik's Cube during a taxi ride. After Jay leaves, Chris lacks the money to pay the fare and chooses to run instead, causing the driver to angrily chase him into a BART station. Chris boards a train but loses one of his scanners in the process. His new relationship with Jay earns him the chance to become an intern stockbroker.
Robert Kanigel (born May 28, 1946) is an American biographer and science writer, known as the author of seven books and more than 400 articles, essays, and reviews. Born in Brooklyn, Kanigel graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, and received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After college, he held three engineering jobs before becoming a freelance writer in 1970. Over the next 30 years, Kanigel lived and wrote in Baltimore, Maryland and San Francisco, California. His articles appeared in magazines including the Johns Hopkins Magazine, Baltimore Sun, The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Wilson Quarterly, Change, American Health, Psychology Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Science 85, The Sciences, Mosaic, Longevity, National Observer, and Human Behavior. His first book, Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty, was published in 1986. This was followed by The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan in 1991; The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency in 1999; High Season: How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand Years in 2002; and Faux Real: Genuine Leather and 200 Years of Inspired Fakes in 2007. Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury, a Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books, published in 1998, is a compilation of 80 book reviews. In 1999, Kanigel became professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. In 2011, he returned to live and write in Baltimore. He is currently working on a biography of Jane Jacobs. On An Irish Island is an ensemble biography of the scholars, linguists, and writers who visited Ireland's Blasket Islands during the early twentieth century. While doing research on one of the subjects of the book, George Derwent Thomson, Kanigel came across the ideas of Milman Parry, the "Darwin of Homeric Studies". Kanigel followed his interest and wrote a biography released in 2021 as Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry.