Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Jane Austen

date_of_death: July 18, 1817

age: 41

cause_of_death: Hodgkin’s disease

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels which include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). With the first four novels which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century she achieved success as an author. She wrote two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. 200 years after her passing Austen continues to inspire many critical essays and literary anthologies. Her novels have inspired many films, from 1940's Pride and Prejudice to more recent productions like Sense and Sensibility (1995), Emma (1996), Mansfield Park (1999), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Love & Friendship (2016), and Emma (2020).

popular name: Thomas Wolfe

date_of_death: September 15, 1938

age: 37

cause_of_death: Miliary tuberculosis

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Thomas Wolfe is considered one of the most autobiographical novelists in American literature and is probably the greatest writer to come out of North Carolina. During his short life he wrote four novels; Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, and You Can’t Go Home Again, as well as numerous short stories, novellas, and plays. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective. After Wolfe's death, contemporary author William Faulkner said that Wolfe might have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, and of authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. Upon his death, he was laid to rest at Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, NC.

popular name: C. S. Forester

date_of_death: April 2, 1966

age: 66

cause_of_death: Decline from heart attack and stroke

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: C.S. Forester is best known for his Horatio Hornblower series, 12 novels set during the Napoleonic Wars that track the adventures and the growth of a young Englishman in the Royal Navy. By 1937, he was well on the way to success with the publication of his first novel in the series. Another of his best-known works, The African Queen, was one of the many of his works that inspired screenplays—for both movies on the big screen and for television—that included some based on the Hornblower novels. Forester also wrote plays and children’s books, and, early in his career, he made contributions to the emerging genre of crime fiction. His masterpiece of suspense, Payment Deferred, foreshadowed the works of later practitioners of mystery fiction. Five biographies, some histories, and an early autobiography were also part of his varied output.