Ellen Glasgow

popular name: Albert Camus

date_of_death: January 4, 1960

age: 46

cause_of_death: Automobile accident

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. Some of his best known works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.The dominant philosophical contribution of Camus’s work is absurdism. While he is often associated with existentialism, he rejected the label, expressing surprise that he would be viewed as a philosophical ally of Sartre. Elements of absurdism and existentialism are present in Camus’s most celebrated writing especially in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The protagonists of The Stranger and The Plague must also confront the absurdity of social and cultural orthodoxies, with dire results. Camus died on January 4, 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. He had spent the New Year's holiday of 1960 at his house in Lourmarin, Vaucluse with his family, and his publisher Michel Gallimard, along with Gallimard's wife, Janine, and daughter. Camus's wife and children went back to Paris by train but Camus decided to return in Gallimard's luxurious Facel Vega FV2. The car crashed into a plane tree on a long straight stretch of the Route nationale 5. Camus, who was in the passenger seat, died instantly. Gallimard died a few days later, although his wife and daughter were unharmed.

popular name: Paul Éluard

date_of_death: November 18, 1952

age: 56

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Paul Éluard was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. He is widely considered the best of the surrealist poets, and his surrealist books include Capitale de la douleur (1926), La Rose publique (1934) and Les Yeux fertiles (1936). Éluard also included among his close friends such visual artists as Picasso, Miró, Tanguy, and Salvador Dali (who stole his first wife, Gala).

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.