John Lennon

John Lennon (1940–1980) was a British musician, songwriter, and artist born in Liverpool, England, who co-founded the Beatles with Paul McCartney in 1960 and subsequently pursued a significant solo career.

As a member of the Beatles — whose recordings between 1963 and 1970 reshaped popular music internationally — Lennon composed some of the most widely known songs in the English language, often in partnership with McCartney. His collaborations with Yoko Ono, whom he married in 1969, moved his practice toward experimental music, performance, and political activism: the Bed-Ins for Peace (Amsterdam and Montreal, 1969), the Plastic Ono Band (1970), and the album Imagine (1971) marked the development of a public and artistic persona inseparable from the anti-Vietnam War movement. He and Ono settled in New York City in 1971, where they faced sustained political surveillance and deportation proceedings under the Nixon administration. Double Fantasy (1980), recorded with Ono and released three weeks before he was murdered, was their final collaborative album. Lennon also produced visual art — drawings and lithographs — and published two books of verbal nonsense, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965).