the old folks

These names, these people, are or were autodidacts. I'm sure you recognize them. They are, to say the least, pretty famous.

Ansel Adams
Louisa May Alcott
L. Frank Baum
Alexander Graham Bell
Ray Bradbury
Frederick Douglass
Thomas Edison
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Frost
Emma Goldman
Abraham Lincoln
H. P. Lovecraft
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe
J. D. Salinger
Nikola Tesla
Henry David Thoreau
Mark Twain
Walt Whitman
Frank Lloyd Wright

That's just a small sample of the Americans. Among the English are Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, and Beatrix Potter.

You think maybe they were on to something?