Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Ayn Rand

date_of_death: March 6, 1982

age: 77

cause_of_death: Heart failure

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Ayn Rand escaped to the United States, where she would eventually publish four novels and a handful of political screeds encouraging selfishness and a lack of concern for others. After the release of her third novel The Fountainhead, Rand began to attract young followers. Few authors have influenced the alt-right more than Russian-American cult leader Ayn Rand. Rand is best known for her fourth novel Atlas Shrugged: a story about how rich industrialist super-humans should wipe out the ordinary mortals and bring about a paradise just for selfish people who like all the same things as Ayn Rand. The problem is that Atlas Shrugged has had a profound influence on a lot of powerful people, who spend their lives trying to dismantle the institutions that vulnerable people depend on to survive. Objectivism teaches that the rich should be free to do whatever they want, no matter how many people get hurt. Later in life she lost her husband to the ravages of alcoholism (a habit born out of Ayn openly cheating with a younger man) and was hemorrhaging money due to cancer surgery and a 30-year addiction to amphetamines. So it came as no surprise when she asked her lawyer to secure social security and Medicare payments using her legal name of Alice O'Connor. That's right - in her own words her books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor). Upon her passing the grave of Ayn Rand can be found at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York - just a short distance from legendary musician Tommy Dorsey.

popular name: Jack Kerouac

date_of_death: October 21, 1969

age: 47

cause_of_death: Abdominal hemorrhage and cirrhosis of the liver due to chronic alcoholism

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist who, alongside Jack Cassidey, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s through the early 60s. After the publication of On The Road and The Dharma Bums Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement. At the time Kerouac greatly influenced many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and the Doors.

popular name: Victor Noir

date_of_death: January 11, 1870

age: 21

cause_of_death: Homicide - gunshot wounds

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Victor Noir was the nom de plume of a budding journalist killed at 21 years old by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The prince was a relative of the reigning monarch, Emperor Napoleon III, the same Napoleon who censured the press and forced writers like Victor Hugo into exile. The little noble shot Victor six times when Noir and another witness went to pick up the prince and drive him to a duel. The prince was quickly tried and acquitted, paying only a pittance in damages for taking another man's life. More than a hundred thousand outraged people crowded for the funeral on a cold January day in 1870. It was a catalyst for anti-royal fervor. Later that same year, after a crushing defeat at a battle in the Franco-Prussian war they imprisoned the last Napoleon.