John Lennon

In Liverpool in 1940, John Winston Lennon arrived into a family already marked by absence, strong women, and wartime strain. His father, Alfred, was a merchant seaman away at the time of his birth, and his mother, Julia, later gave custody of him to her sister Mimi. Lennon grew up at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue in Woolton, with Mimi and her husband George Toogood Smith. The household was not a conventional one, and Lennon later spoke of the “five strong, intelligent, beautiful women” around him as his “first feminist education.”

Music reached him early and personally. His aunt bought him books of short stories, his uncle gave him a mouth organ, and Julia visited regularly, playing Elvis Presley records, teaching him the banjo, and showing him how to play Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” As a teenager, Lennon was caught up in the skiffle craze. In 1956 he formed the Quarrymen, the group that evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Within a few years, he was known around the world as the band’s founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist.

With Paul McCartney, Lennon formed the most successful songwriting partnership in history. He was initially the Beatles’ de facto leader, though that role gradually seemed to pass toward McCartney. Alongside the music, Lennon also showed a taste for wordplay and absurd humor, publishing In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works in the mid-1960s, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. From 1967’s “All You Need Is Love” onward, his songs were taken up as anthems by the counterculture and anti-war movement.

In 1969, Lennon began a new chapter with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono. Together they started the Plastic Ono Band, collaborated on avant-garde albums and films, and staged a two-week bed-in for peace. That same year, Lennon left the Beatles and moved into solo work. Between 1969 and 1972, he reached the UK top 10 with “Give Peace a Chance,” “Instant Karma!,” “Imagine,” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” In 1970, he released John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the first of four LPs he co-produced with Phil Spector.

After moving to New York City in 1971, Lennon’s criticism of the Vietnam War led to a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. He and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, a period in which he produced Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats and had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John on “Whatever Gets You thru the Night” and David Bowie on “Fame.” Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. Three weeks after its release, he was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman.

Lennon’s reach was vast: as a performer, writer, or co-writer, he had 25 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as a solo artist he placed five singles in the top 10 in both the UK and the U.S. Yet the appeal of his words is not only in the numbers. He wrote and spoke with a rawness that could be funny, abrasive, hopeful, and plainspoken. “Being honest may not get you a lot of friends,” he once said, “but it’ll surely get you the right ones.” That directness is still a large part of why people keep returning to him.