• Philander Barclay
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Ernest Hemingway
• Doris Humphrey
• George Maher
• Bob Newhart

• Carl Rogers
• J. Robert Schrieffer
• Carol Shields
• Charles Simic
• Grace W. Trout
• Frank LLoyd Wright

Oak Park Photographer & Historian. He took more than a thousand photographs of Oak Park and River Forest, which are the foundation of our current historical photographic archives of the villages.

Writer; created Tarzan and fantastic tales of science fiction. Burroughs was also reknown for writings including the "John Carter of Mars" books, magazine stories, and many other published works. Burroughs captivated many children and adults alike with his imaginative tales.

Writer; Nobel Prize in Literature 1954. The Hemingway's Life pages summarizes his life and work, including his close connections to Oak Park.

Doris Humphrey was born and raised in Oak Park, and later had a dance studio in town. She was one of the founders of modern dance in America.

Prairie School Architect. Maher was one of the most prominent Prairie School architects at the turn of the century, and designed a number of Oak Park and River Forest homes, including the celebrated Farson-Mills House.

Comedian; Movie & TV Actor. Our most well-known celebrity is a mega-star of Television, has appeared in many Movies, his Comedy is familiar to all, and his first Comedy Album ranks 20th in Billboard Magazine's all time Hall-of-Fame.

Founder of Client-Centered Therapy. Rogers founded client-centered psychotherapy and pioneered in the development of scientific methods for studying psychotherapeutic outcomes and processes. He published his ideas and clinical results in several books, including On "Becomimg a Person" which made him a well-known figure in American psychology.

Nobel Prize in Physics, 1972, for jointly developing the theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of which he is a member of their council, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Writer; Playwrite. Shields is the author of several novels and short-story collections, including The Orange Fish, Swann, Various Miracles, Happenstance, and The Republic of Love. Her books have won a Canada Council Major Award, two National Magazine Awards, the Canadian Author's Award, and a Pulitzer prize, among many others.

Poet. Simic is the author of more than 60 books, and his work has won numerous prestigious awards, including: the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1990 for his book of prose-poems "The World Doesn't End", the coveted MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1984-89. In 1995, Simic was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

Mrs. Trout lived in Oak Park from about 1903 to 1921. She was a well-known suffragist who won presidential suffrage for the women of Illinois during her term as President of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. Mrs. Trout's activities resulted in presidential suffrage for the 1.6 million women of Illinois in 1913, seven years before the Nineteenth Amendment. She was also instrumental in ensuring the passage of a state constitutional convention, which drafted a state constitution that guaranteed women equal rights.

Architect; Founder of Prairie School of Architecture. Oak Park's most famous "celebrated citizen". Tour his houses and read about his life on the very popular "Wright in Oak Park" site.