List of Famous people born in Pennsylvania, United States of America

Joseph Sweeney was an American actor who worked in stage productions, television and movies. His most famous role was as the elderly Juror #9 in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men, the role he originated in a 1954 Westinghouse Studio One live teleplay of which the film was an adaptation.

George Gray Leiper was a Jacksonian member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

Melissa Bank is an American author. She has published two books—The Wonder Spot, a volume of short stories; and The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, a novel—which have been translated into over 30 languages. Bank was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Malcolm Cowley was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), his lyrical memoir, Exile's Return, as a chronicler and fellow traveller of the Lost Generation, and as an influential editor and talent scout at Viking Press.

Olive Thomas was an American silent-film actress, art model, and photo model.

Richard Schultz Schweiker was an American businessman and politician. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 14th U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983. He previously served as a U.S. Representative (1961–1969) and a U.S. Senator (1969–1981) from Pennsylvania. In 1976, Schweiker was Reagan's vice presidential pick during his unsuccessful presidential campaign.

Viola Fauver Liuzzo was an American housewife and civil rights activist. In March 1965, Liuzzo heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. At the age of 39, while driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was fatally hit by shots fired from a pursuing car containing Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members Collie Wilkins, William Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and Gary Thomas Rowe, the latter of whom was actually an undercover informant working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He previously worked as an official at the Pentagon, where he dealt with issues relating to the Middle East, and as political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

Theodore William Richards was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."