Famous Relationships

Over the years, many famous people have had their lives changed by relationships with their students and teachers. Some of the most notable, with mentor first, include:
  • Henry James, mentor to Edith Wharton (writers)
  • Ambrose Bierce, mentor to Ernest Hemingway & Jack London (writers)
  • Walt Whitman & William Carlos Williams, mentors to Allen Ginsberg (writers)
  • H. L. Mencken, mentor to Sinclair Lewis (writers)
  • Ezra Pound, mentor to T. S. Eliot (writers)
  • James Joyce, mentor to Samuel Beckett (writers)
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, mentor to Henry David Thoreau (writers)
  • Mike Wallace, mentor to Barbara Walters (journalists)
  • Walter Cronkite, mentor to Dan Rather (journalists)
  • Jack Lemmon & Jason Robards, mentors to Kevin Spacey (actors)
  • Warren Beatty, mentor to Diane Keaton (actors)
  • Ingmar Bergman, mentor to Woody Allen (directors)
  • Audrey Hepburn, mentor to Elizabeth Taylor (actors)
  • Lorne Michaels, mentor to Conan O'Brien (comedians)
  • Stanley Kubrick, mentor to Steven Spielberg (directors)
  • Francis Ford Coppola, mentor to George Lucas (directors)
  • Don Henley, mentor to Sheryl Crow (musicians)
  • Bobby Darin, mentor to Wayne Newton (musicians)
  • Dizzy Gillespie, mentor to Arturo Sandoval (musicians)
  • Lionel Hampton, mentor to Quincy Jones (musicians)
  • Bing Crosby, mentor to Frank Sinatra (musicians)
  • Woody Guthrie & Joan Baez, mentors to Bob Dylan (musicians)
  • Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, mentor to Sergey Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (composers)
  • Johann Christian Bach, mentor to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composers)
  • Oscar Hammerstein II, mentor to Stephen Sondheim (lyricists)
  • George Balanchine, mentor to Maria Tallchief (dancers)
  • Tallulah Bankhead, mentor to Eugenia Rawls (actors)
  • Patrick Ewing, mentor to Alonzo Mourning & Okembe Mutombo (athletes)
  • Cal Ripken, Sr., mentor to Cal Ripken, Jr. (athletes)
  • Lance Armstrong, mentor to Tyler Hamilton (athletes)
  • Viktor Petrenko, mentor to Oksana Baiul (athletes)
  • Floyd Mayweather, Sr., mentor to Oscar de la Hoya (athletes)
  • Muhammad Ali, mentor to Laila Ali (athletes)
  • Mario Lemieux, mentor to Jaromir Jagr (athletes)
  • Goran Ivanisevic, mentor to Ivan Ljubicic (athletes)
  • Margaret Thatcher, mentor to John Major (politicians)
  • Theodore Roosevelt, mentor to William Howard Taft (politicians)
  • William Fulbright, mentor to William J. Clinton (politicians)
  • George Monroe, mentor to George Eastman (photographers)
  • William Lloyd Garrison, mentor to Frederick Douglass (abolitionists)
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mentor to Susan B. Anthony (suffragists)
  • Sigmund Freud, mentor to C. G. Jung (psychologists)
  • Bertrand Russell, mentor to Karl Ponder & Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophers)
  • Alfred North Whitehead, mentor to Susanne Knauth Langer (philosophers)
  • Archimedes, mentor to Galileo (scientists)
  • Socrates, mentor to Plato (philosophers)
  • Rudi Dornbusch, mentor to Paul Krugman (economists)
  • Andrew Carnegie, mentor to Charles Schwab (businessmen)
  • Robert H. Boyle, mentor to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (environmentalists)
  • Neils Bohr, mentor to Werner Heisenberg (physicists)