John Maynard Keynes

English economist, prolific author and architect of the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank. The author of "Economic Consequences of Peace" in 1919, his most noted works were his two books, "Treatise on Money," 1930 and "The General Theory of Employment," 1936.

The son of a Cambridge administrator, Keynes excelled in his early schooling due to a lot of hand-holding by his parents. He loved his mother very much. His father not only coached him through every exam he ever took from Eton up to the Civil Service, but he also made the decision that math would be his course of study. His formal study ended when he placed a disappointing twelfth in his final exam at the end of his second year, at which point he turned to economics. Never studying the subject in a formal way beyond eight weeks tutorials with Alfred Marshall, he went on to become this century's most influential economist. The young Keynes had a habit of lying in bed and reading the poetry of Longfellow and his real education came from the Apostle, a secret society started at Cambridge in 1820 and originally devoted to a philosophy of life for the cloistered. Earlier members of the group were Bertrand Russell and Guy Burgess with few scientists among them. During Keynes' generation and after, many of the members were gay. From this group emerged the Bloomsbury group including Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Demond McCarthy, Clive Bell, along with the added members Vanessa Stephen and her sister Virginia Woolf plus a few others. The artists and writers of the Bloomsbury provided him with a circle of friends, lovers, moral censors and financial dependents.

In 1906 Keynes left for London to take the Civil Service exam and sailed through it with his lowest scores being in economics. He worked in the India office from 1906 to 1908 and made his mark by writing a minor classic on Indian banking and finance.