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: 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.

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.