Carl Van Vechten · Public domain

Wrote Rhapsody in Blue at 25, fusing jazz and orchestral music into something American concert halls hadn't heard before, and followed it with An American in Paris and the opera Porgy and Bess — dismissed as a commercial failure on arrival, now considered one of the defining American operas of the century. Both Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger turned down his requests to study composition with them, worried formal training would blunt the jazz instincts that made his music distinctive. He died of a brain tumor in 1937 at 38.