Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Jean-Paul Sartre

date_of_death: April 15, 1980

age: 74

cause_of_death: Pulmonary edema

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, sexual predator and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it. Major philosophical works include Being and Nothingness (1943) where he explored human consciousness, freedom, and "bad faith" and Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), a public lecture defending existentialism. Sartre's best known literary works include Nausea (1938), a novel expressing existential dread and No Exit (1944), famous for the line "Hell is other people." Upon his passing the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre at Cimetière du Montparnasse is a top tourist attraction. His legacy ... not so much.

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: Charles Dickens

date_of_death: June 9, 1870

age: 58

cause_of_death: Stroke

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) was an English writer and journalist. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. Among his greatest works include The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.