Researching John Lennon

Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called "the smart Beatle", he was initially the group's de facto leader, a role gradually ceded to McCartney. In the mid-1960s, Lennon authored In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, two collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with "All You Need Is Love", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, the multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-Ins for Peace, and quit the Beatles to embark on a solo career.

Between 1968 and 1972, Lennon and Ono collaborated on many records, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and the international top 10 singles "Give Peace a Chance", "Instant Karma!", "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year attempt by the Richard Nixon administration to deport him. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, a period that included chart-topping collaborations with Elton John ("Whatever Gets You thru the Night") and David Bowie ("Fame"). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was shot and killed by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release.

As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his best-selling album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. In 1982, Lennon won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and thirty-eighth greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994).

In 1798 he was in command of the General Keppel, also of Martinique, which was capsized in a white squall on passage from Philadelphia, when Lennon and some of his crew were rescued by a passing schooner, after suffering great perils and hardships. Lennon performed various daring feats in the West Indies in 1806–9; but his most remarkable exploits were in Hibernia, a Cowes-built barque, carrying six guns and about twenty-two men and boys all told, in which he traded for some years from the West India island of St. Thomas. In 1812 orders were issued that no vessels should leave the island without convoy, on account of the American privateers. The Hibernia and three other merchantmen, whose aggregate cargoes were valued at half a million sterling, had long been waiting. Unwilling to detain them further, Governor Maclean agreed to their sailing without convoy, on condition of Lennon hoisting his pennant as commodore. Although harassed by Rossie, Commodore Joshua Barney, an American privateer of superior force, Lennon brought his vessels safe into the English Channel on 18 October 1812.

Two years later Lennon was attacked, on 19 July 1814, by the schooner Comet of Baltimore, U.S., an American privateer of sixteen guns and 136 men, which he beat off after a nine-hour fight, in which twelve out of his crew of twenty-two hands were killed or wounded. Two lawsuits followed with the underwriters of the Hibernia's cargo, and Lennon and his owners were liable for £8,000 in damages, or more than double the loss that would have been incurred if Lennon had surrendered.

In 1818–19, Lennon and Hibernia transported convicts to Van Diemen's Land.

Lennon and his wife Mary had two daughters. He died in retirement at his home, in Plymouth, England, on 27 August 1846 from complications (a bronchial infection) resulting from a wound he received in 1796.