Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Erich Maria Remarque

date_of_death: September 25, 1970

age: 72

cause_of_death: Heart failure

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Erich Maria Remarque was a German-born novelist best known for his stark and poignant depictions of war and its aftermath. Born on June 22, 1898, in Osnabrück, Germany, he served as a soldier in World War I, an experience that profoundly shaped his worldview and writing. His most famous work, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), is a powerful anti-war novel that presents the harrowing experiences of German soldiers during the Great War. The book was a massive success internationally but faced backlash in Nazi Germany, where it was banned and publicly burned. Remarque fled the country in the 1930s, eventually settling in the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. Throughout his career, he continued to explore themes of disillusionment, exile, and the human cost of war in novels such as The Road Back, Arch of Triumph, and The Black Obelisk. Remarque died on September 25, 1970, in Locarno, Switzerland.

popular name: Dashiell Hammett

date_of_death: January 10, 1961

age: 66

cause_of_death: Lung cancer

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: The name Dashiell Hammett is synonymous with the "hard-boiled" genre of detective fiction. Born Samuel Dashiell Hammett, he worked as a detective in his early twenties and later wrote numerous popular mystery novels, most famously "The Maltese Falcon" (1930) and "The Thin Man" (1931). Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918 and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps, but spent most of World War I hospitalized for influenza and tuberculosis. Hammett enlisted again after Pearl Harbor, at the age of 48, and was stationed at a base in the Aleutian Islands. A vocal supporter of civil liberties and left-leaning causes, Hammett was blacklisted as a suspected communist during the early Cold War, and he served six months in jail for refusing to divulge the names of those who helped fund an activist group that he led.

popular name: Wallace Stevens

date_of_death: August 2, 1955

age: 75

cause_of_death: Stomach cancer

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955. Stevens's best-known poems include "The Auroras of Autumn", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Though now considered one of the major American poets of the twentieth century, Stevens did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1954), just a year before his death. His other major works include The Necessary Angel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), a collection of essays on poetry; Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (The Cummington Press, 1942); The Man With the Blue Guitar (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937); and Ideas of Order (The Alcestis Press, 1935). His published book The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954) earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.