Thomas Wolfe

popular name: Franz Kafka

date_of_death: June 3, 1924

age: 40

cause_of_death: Laryngeal tuberculosis and starvation

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian writer born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now the Czech Republic). He is widely regarded as one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. Kafka was born into a middle-class Jewish family and had a complicated relationship with his domineering father, which deeply influenced his writing. He studied law at the University of Prague and worked for much of his life in insurance, writing in his spare time. Kafka’s works often explore themes of alienation, absurdity, and the oppressive power of bureaucracy, with his most famous stories including The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle. His distinctive style blends realism with surreal, nightmarish scenarios, reflecting a sense of existential dread. Despite writing prolifically, Kafka published only a few works during his lifetime and instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy his manuscripts after his death. Brod ignored these wishes and instead edited and published much of Kafka’s work, securing his posthumous reputation.

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: Bernard Clavel

date_of_death: October 5, 2010

age: 87

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Writers and Poets

best_know_for: The popular French novelist Bernard Clavel, who started his career as a baker, published his first novel "Night Worker" in 1956 and went on to write more 40 more, including "The Fruits of Winter" which in 1968 won France's coveted Goncourt prize. Several of his works, which focused on humble characters and used simple language, were adapted for the cinema and television.