Category: Deaths

Famous people who died today

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Died on this day – 10 November 2001

Kesey

Kenneth Elton Kesey was born on 17 September 1935. He was an American novelist, essayist, and major figure in the counterculture of the 1960s. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Kesey was born in Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon. He graduatedfrom the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1960. The novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later. During this period Kesey participated in government studies involving hallucinogenic drugs to supplement his income.

Following the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he moved to nearby La Honda, California, and began hosting happenings with former colleagues from Stanford, miscellaneous bohemian and literary figures (most notably Neal Cassady), and other friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters; these parties, known as Acid Tests, integrated the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances.

In1964 his novel Sometimes a Great Notion was published. An epic account of the vicissitudes of an Oregon logging family was a commercial success that polarized critics and readers upon its release, although Kesey regarded the novel as his magnum opus.[

In 1965, following an arrest for marijuana possession and subsequent faked suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, he returned home and settled in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life.

In 2001 Kesey made a trip to France and visited Montmorillon in a search for the famous cuckoo that nests close to the banks of the river Gartempe. After a friendly visit to The Glass Key bookshop in the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon Kesey went in search of the nest, but unfortunately fell into the river and drowned. Not such a great notion then.

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Died on this day – 7 June 1967

Parker

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild)was born on 22August 1893 was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in publications such as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table . Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.

Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a “wisecracker.” Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured.

Holidaying in France in 1967 Parker visited Montmorillon where she admired the Cité de l’Ecrit with its wonderful mixture of everything bookish. Unfortunately when she called at The Glass Key bookshop and checked their reasonably extensive humour section she found none of her own publications on display. She then suffered a heart attack and died on 7 June 1967. 

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Died on this day – 2 June 1962

Vita

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, was born on 9 March 1892. She was usually known as Vita Sackville-West and was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer.

She was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime and 13 novels. She was twice awarded the HawthorndenPrize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf

She had a longstanding column in The Observer (1946-1961) and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

Keen to visit the famous weekend of Jardin Passion she came to Montmorillon in 1962 where she also visited The Glass Key and she much admired the wide rang of gardening books in stock there. Unfortunately she succumbed to abdominal cancer and died in the bookshop on 2 June 1962.

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Died on this day 28 March 1941

Virginia Woolf

Photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1902

Adeline Virginia Woolf ( née Stephen), born on 25 January 1882, was an English writer who is considered one of the most important modernist twentieth century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

She was born in an affluent household in South Kensington, London, attended the Ladies’ Department of Kings College and was acquainted with the early reformers of women’s higher education. Having been home-schooled for the most part of her childhood Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the interwar period, Virginia Woolf was an important part of London’s literary society as well as a central figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. She published her first novel titled The Voyage Out in 1915, through her half-brother’s publishing house, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she wrote the much-quoted dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Her works are widely read all over the world and have been translated into more than fifty languages. She suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life. Holidaying in France she visited The Glass Key bookshop in Montmorillon’s Cité de l’Ecrit . She seemed pleased to find some of her books in stock there and others published by the Hogarth Press, which she had founded with her husband Leonard Woolf. Nonetheless on 28 March 1941she took her own life by drowning in the river Gartempe.. She was 59 years of age.

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Died on this day, 24 March 1905

verne

Jules Verne photographed by Nadar c.1878

Jules Gabriel Verne the French novelist, poet and playwright was born on 8 February 1828 in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaire, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism.  His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children’s books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.

Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the “Father of Science Fiction”.

Suffering badly from diabetes, Verne took a trip to Montmorillon and there, whilst admiring the wide range of science fiction books for sale in The Glass Key bookshop in the Cité de l’Ecrit, on 24 March 1905, he died. His body was taken to Amiens where he is buried.

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Died on this day – 31 August 1867

Étienne_Carjat,_Portrait_of_Charles_Baudelaire,_circa_1862Charles Pierre Baudelaire, born on 9 April 1821, was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

His most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal, expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire’s highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term “modernity” (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess. Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed. After more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church. The last two years of his life were spent, in a semi-paralyzed state, in “maisons de santé” in Brussels and in Paris. In the hope of a cure Baudelaire was taken on a trip to Montmorillon. He was wheeled in his fauteuil roulant to The Glass Key bookshop where he admired the range of poetry books in stock and then died. It was 31 August 1867. Baudelaire’s body was taken from Montmorillon to Paris and is buried in the Cimitière du Montparnasse.

Many of Baudelaire’s works were published posthumously. After his death, his mother paid off his substantial debts, and at last she found some comfort in Baudelaire’s emerging fame. “I see that my son, for all his faults, has his place in literature.” She lived another four years and never visited Montmorillon.

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Died on this day 6 April 1992

Isaac Asimov

 

Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Ozimov on or about 2 January 1920, was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He was known for his works of science fiction and popular science. Asimov was a prolific writer, and he wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.

Asimov wrote hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov’s most famous work is the Foundation series. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series.

Asimov wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction “Nightfall”, which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction.

Asimov’s wide interests included his participation in his later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and in The Wolfe Pack, a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. He was also a prominent member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society.

In the spring of 1992 Asimov was on a cruise and the ship docked at Bordeaux. With time in hand Asimov took a trip to see the famed Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon. It was here in Montmorillon whilst admiring the broad range of science fiction titles available at The Glass Key bookshop that Asimov died on 6 April 1992. (It may, of course, have been on Betelgeuse).

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Died on this day – 30 March 2005

RobertCreeley
Photo credit: Chris Felver

The American poet Robert Creeley was born on 21 May 1926. He was author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school’s. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn.

In his later years he was an advocate of, and a mentor to, many younger poets, as well as to others outside of the poetry world. He went to great lengths to be supportive to many people regardless of any poetic affiliation. Being responsive appeared to be essential to his personal ethics, and he seemed to take this responsibility extremely seriously, in both his life and his craft. In his later years, when he became well-known, he would go to lengths to make strangers, who approached him as a well-known author, feel comfortable. In his last years, he used the Internet to keep in touch with many younger poets and friends.

Despite suffering the onset of pneumonia in 2005 Creeley made a trip to Europe and paid a visit to Montmorillon. He expressed enthusiasm for the concept of the Cité de l’Ecrit and was impressed by the range of books by American poets available at The Glass Key. Staying at the Hotel de France Robert Creeley died at sunrise on 30 March 30 2005 of complications from preumonia. He is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Died on this day – 10 March 1940

Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was born on 15 May 1891. He was a Russian writer, physician and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita which has been called one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

The Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov began writing in 1928 and which was finally published by his widow in 1966, twenty-six years after his death, led to an international appreciation of his work. A destroyed manuscript of the Master is an important element of the plot. Bulgakov had to rewrite the novel from memory after he burned the draft manuscript.

The novel begins with Satan visiting Moscow in the 1930s, joining a conversation between a critic and a poet debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It develops into an all-embracing indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Soviet Russia. Published more than 25 years after Bulgakov’s death, and more than ten years after Stalin’s, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov’s place among the pantheon of great Russian writers.

In March 1940 Bulgakov visited the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon and was pleased to find advance copies of his masterpiece on display in the Glass Key bookshop – 26 years in advance of its publication in Russia. So surprised by this was he that the nephroscelerosis that had killed his father finally caught up with him and he too died there and then in the bookshop.

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Died on this day – 25 February 1983

tennessee_williams_nywts

Orlando Fernandez, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection

 

Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III, born on 26 March 1911, was an American playwright. Along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th-century American drama.

After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944), closely reflecting his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). His later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Long Day’s Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams’ most acclaimed work was adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs.

On a trip to Europe in 1983 Williams visited Montmorillon where, after a visit to the Glass Key bookshop, he retired to the Trappe au Livres bar and launched into a serious bout of drinking before retiring to his room in the Hotel de France. It was here in his bed that he was found dead the next morning having choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of a nasal spray dispenser.