Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Louis Aragon

date_of_death: December 24, 1982

age: 85

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Louis Aragon was a French poet who was one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in France. He co-founded with André Breton and Philippe Soupault the surrealist review Littérature. He was also a novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 'Elsa's Eyes', the poem to his Russian-born wife, Elsa Triolet, who died in 1970, stood as one of his most memorable pieces along with 'The Peasant in Paris,' 'Crazy About Elsa,' 'Put to Death' and 'Holy Week.'

popular name: Samuel Beckett

date_of_death: December 22, 1989

age: 83

cause_of_death: Respiratory failure

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Samuel Beckett was an enigmatic and reclusive Irish playwright, poet and novelist who won a Nobel Prize for literature and who was best known for his 1952 drama, "Waiting for Godot". Beckett was considered one of the primary exponents of a dramatic style that came to be known as theater of the absurd, an art form in which events and reality seem to have little relationship with one another, plots lack sense and logic, and time is out of order. His work was tragic and comical at the same time, despairing yet hopeful, and it profoundly affected the course and development of 20th century theater.

popular name: Otto Plath

date_of_death: November 5, 1940

age: 55

cause_of_death: Embolism in the lung and untreated diabetes

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Otto Emil Plath was a German-American writer, academic, and biologist. After reading the writings of Charles Darwin, Plath also developed an interest in biology. In the following years, Plath taught and studied in both German and biology. In 1912, he earned an M.A. from the University of Washington. Beginning in 1922, Plath taught at Boston University. In 1925, Plath earned an M.S. from Harvard University, and in 1928, he earned a Ph.D in science, also from Harvard. Plath worked as a professor of biology and German language at Boston University and as an entomologist, with a specific expertise on bumblebees. He was the father of American poet Sylvia Plath and Warren Plath, and the husband of Aurelia Plath. He wrote the 1934 book Bumblebees and Their Ways. He is notable for being the subject of "Daddy", one of his daughter's most well-known poems. Interesting to note that Otto is the only Plath to be buried at Winthrop Cemetery.