Ellen Glasgow

popular name: James Baldwin

date_of_death: December 1, 1987

age: 63

cause_of_death: Stomach cancer

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: James Baldwin was an American author, playwright, poet and activist. His work explored the intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in the Western society of the United States during the mid twentieth-century. He used themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class to create narratives that ran parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change of the twentieth-century. His best known work includes Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni's Room (1956), The Fire Next Time (1963), and No Name in the Street (1972). Two of his works, 'Remember This House' and 'If Beale Street Could Talk', were adapted into Academy Award-winning films.

popular name: Thomas Wolfe

date_of_death: September 15, 1938

age: 37

cause_of_death: Miliary tuberculosis

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Thomas Wolfe is considered one of the most autobiographical novelists in American literature and is probably the greatest writer to come out of North Carolina. During his short life he wrote four novels; Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, and You Can’t Go Home Again, as well as numerous short stories, novellas, and plays. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective. After Wolfe's death, contemporary author William Faulkner said that Wolfe might have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, and of authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. Upon his death, he was laid to rest at Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, NC.

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.