Jules Renard

popular name: Oscar Wilde

date_of_death: November 30, 1900

age: 46

cause_of_death: Meningitis following an acute ear infection

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill. Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. Undeniably brilliant, the author, playwright and poet was known for his acclaimed works including 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' as well as his brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality. Aside from is collective works, he is also remembered for the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials" and imprisonment. At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labor, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. Today his collective works are considered among the great literary masterpieces of the late Victorian period.

popular name: E. E. Cummings

date_of_death: September 3, 1962

age: 67

cause_of_death: Stroke

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Now remembered largely for his funky punctuation, E. E. Cummings was for decades one of America’s most celebrated, controversial, and popular poets—the dashing, impecunious prince of Greenwich Village. An American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright, he wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

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.