Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Émile Zola

date_of_death: September 29, 1902

age: 62

cause_of_death: Carbon monoxide poisoning caused by an improperly ventilated chimney, but some speculation of possible homicide

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Émile Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. Naturalism contributes something more than realism: the attention brought to bear on the most lush and opulent aspects of people and the natural world. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.

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: 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.