Ellen Glasgow

popular name: C. S. Lewis

date_of_death: November, 22 1963

age: 64

cause_of_death: Kidney failure

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: C. S. Lewis was a British author, literary scholar and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–1954), and Magdalene College, Cambridge (1954–1963). He is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he is also noted for his other works of fiction, such as The Screwtape Letters and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity, Miracles and The Problem of Pain. Although he was acknowledged in university circles as a brilliant lecturer and tutor, his wider fame rested on his three dozen or so books. He wrote science-fiction and children's stories as well as works on literature and religion. Upon his passing, in paperback editions alone, about one million copies of his books had been sold.

popular name: Dashiell Hammett

date_of_death: January 10, 1961

age: 66

cause_of_death: Lung cancer

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: The name Dashiell Hammett is synonymous with the "hard-boiled" genre of detective fiction. Born Samuel Dashiell Hammett, he worked as a detective in his early twenties and later wrote numerous popular mystery novels, most famously "The Maltese Falcon" (1930) and "The Thin Man" (1931). Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918 and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps, but spent most of World War I hospitalized for influenza and tuberculosis. Hammett enlisted again after Pearl Harbor, at the age of 48, and was stationed at a base in the Aleutian Islands. A vocal supporter of civil liberties and left-leaning causes, Hammett was blacklisted as a suspected communist during the early Cold War, and he served six months in jail for refusing to divulge the names of those who helped fund an activist group that he led.

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.