Simone de Beauvoir

popular name: Victor Hugo

date_of_death: May 22, 1885

age: 83

cause_of_death: Pneumonia

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Victor Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables (1862), and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages). Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

popular name: Lewis Carroll

date_of_death: January 14, 1898

age: 65

cause_of_death: Pneumonia

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Daresbury, England, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, and photographer, best known for his iconic works Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll was the eldest boy of 11 children and attended Rugby School and then attended Oxford University in 1850. He would remain at Christ Church as student, teacher and in various others roles until his death. Despite his academic success, his true passion lay in writing and storytelling. Under the pen name Lewis Carroll, he began writing stories and poems, blending fantasy, logic, and wordplay. His most famous works, the Alice books, originated from a storytelling session for the young Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church. These books became celebrated for their imaginative narratives, playful language, and deep philosophical undertones, earning Carroll a lasting place in literary history. Carroll was also a pioneering photographer, particularly known for his portraits of young girls, including Alice Liddell. His photography career, however, has been the subject of some controversy due to his obsession with young subjects. Though Carroll spent much of his life in relative obscurity, his works gradually gained fame, and he became a beloved figure in British literature.

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.