The Beatles: John Lennon - Biography

John Winston Ono Lennon (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980) was a member of the rock band The Beatles. After the Beatles stopped making records in 1970, he lived in the United States with his wife Yoko Ono, and continued his music career. Lennon enjoyed a successful, but brief solo career, selling 14 million albums in the US alone with such acclaimed albums as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine while writing iconic songs such as "Strawberry Fields Forever", "A Day In The Life", "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine".

Lennon's death broke hearts around the world. In the U.S., it recalled nothing so much as the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, an event for which, ironically, the arrival of the Beatles a few months later had provided a welcome tonic. In the twenty-five years since, Lennon's influence and symbolic importance have only grown. His music, of course, will live forever. But he has survived primarily as a restless voice of change and independent thought. He is an enemy of the status quo, a bundle of contradictions who insisted on a world in which all the various elements of his personality could find free, untrammeled expression. Innumerable times since his death Lennon has been sorely missed. And just as many times and more he has been present - evoked by all of us who find ourselves and each other in the music he made and the vision that he articulated and tried to make real.