Ten voices, from a Blasket Island seanchaí to a Harlem street poet, who carried the world's stories through a century that kept trying to silence them. The 20th century should have been fatal to the storyteller.

Ten pairs of hands, from the bunraku stage to the television studio, that taught the modern world how to believe in a puppet again. Puppetry is one of the oldest arts we have, and for most of its history it belonged to the fairground, the temple courtyard, and the nursery.

Ten performers and showmen who turned the traveling circus, from the 1870s to the 1970s, into the greatest show on earth, one impossible feat at a time. For roughly a hundred years, before film and radio and television reached into every town, the circus was the biggest thing most people would ever see.

Ten comedians who taught the movies how to be funny, from the pratfalls of the silent screen to the first wisecracks of sound. Before the movies could speak, they had already learned to make people laugh, and no art form was ever quite so suited to it.

Ten writers, from a Norwegian parlor to a Lagos courtyard, who taught the modern stage what a play could carry. A century before these writers, a serious evening at the theater usually meant verse, spectacle, and a tidy moral.

Ten directors who, between the 1940s and the 1980s, made cinema a language the whole world could speak. For a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century, the most exciting art form on earth was learning to travel.