Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Mary Shelley

date_of_death: February 1, 1851

age: 53

cause_of_death: Suspected brain tumor

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Mary Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein (also called The Modern Prometheus 1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.

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.

popular name: Edith Anisfield Wolf

date_of_death: January 23, 1963

age: 73

cause_of_death: Unknown

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Edith Anisfield Wolf was an American poet and philanthropist from Cleveland, Ohio who founded and endowed an award in 1935 for non-fiction books that advance racial understanding. In 1941 the foundation expanded the award, now called the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, to include fiction and poetry. Notable recipients during Wolf’s lifetime included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King Jr. Notable recipients after her death have included Alex Haley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Ralph Ellison, Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. The awards, $1,000 per recipient in the 1930s, now amount to $10,000 each.