Don’t we all love looking, Diane Seuss wondered, at dead things?
John Keats died at 25. Tuberculosis? An infection? Consumption? A murderous review? He refused to give his death a name, but it knew his.
Stephen Crane was 28. He’d published five novels, two books of poetry, three story collections, two books of war stories, and scores of articles. Among his lost and unfinished works, his potential canon fodder: Flowers of Asphalt, George’s Mother, The O’Ruddy.
Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was just 30 when he learned his terminally ill mother would not regain consciousness. He typed out a brief poem about the elegiac beauty of expiring lamps before extinguishing his own.
At thirty, Emily Brontë had already outlived three of her five siblings and her mother as well. She refused medicines sent by a man she referred to as the “poisoning doctor.” The carpenter remarked on the narrowness of her coffin.
Only three people attended John Kennedy Toole’s funeral. His mother destroyed his suicide note, but swore to see his unpublished novel into print.
A writer to the end, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa gave his suicide letter a title: “A Note to a Certain Old Friend.”
Lord Byron, romantic poet and legendary seducer, was 36 when he died but already fat, bald, and plagued by rotting teeth.
Arthur Rimbaud was 37 and had abandoned poetry for nearly 20 years to sell coffee and guns in Ethiopia. He’d had a leg amputated, but that didn’t stop the bone cancer or the immense pain. At the end, according to the priest by his side, the once-great-blasphemer-turned-merchant made a deal with god.
After years of pain and fatigue that would make writing almost impossible, Flannery O’Connor died from lupus. That wolf, she told a friend, was tearing the place up. She’d been first diagnosed at 25, about a decade after she’d watched the same disease devour her father.
Franz Kafka effectively starved to death after laryngeal tuberculosis made eating a torture. He was working on “A Hunger Artist.”
Days before Poe’s death he was found wandering, disheveled, ranting, and wearing someone else’s clothes. Whose, unknown. As is what became of his own. The funeral was so poorly attended, the minister skipped the eulogy. The service: three minutes long. The cause of Poe’s death has been, over the years, variously attributed to syphilis, alcoholism, rabies, apoplexy, epilepsy, diabetes, a rare brain disease, congestion of the brain, suicide, lead poisoning, mercury poisoning, and meningeal inflammation.
Jane Austen, 41.
“I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time.” The causal relationship between Anton Chekhov’s last words intrigues.
In his last years, F. Scott Fitzgerald thought himself a hack. He was living in a cheap room at the Garden of Allah Bungalows on Sunset Boulevard, gorging on Coca-Cola and sweets to keep himself from drinking. What little money he had was mostly spent on Zelda’s psychiatric treatment and his daughter’s education. Collapsed on a sidewalk with his heart exploding, his last words were “I suppose people will think I’m drunk.” The Catholic church refused him burial in his family’s plot. Thirty people attended his funeral.
Isaac Babel was executed after eight months of imprisonment and torture.
Most books are ignored. Some, like the novel Oromay by Baalu Girma, which describes the genocidal Red Star Campaign of the Ethiopian military junta in Eritrea, get you killed.
Throughout his life, Yukio Mishima liked having his much-anticipated death photographed. Staged images exist of him being drowned, hatcheted, run over, and pierced through by arrows. Before performing ritual suicide in front a televised audience, he rehearsed the event in both a story and novel, and he performed the role in a movie as well. His mother acknowledged that in the end her son had done what he’d always wanted to do. His last written words were “Human life is limited, but I want to live forever.”
Among Mishima’s last spoken words, “I don’t think they heard me.”
Georges Perec worked as an archivist in the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory of a Parisian hospital for 17 years. He might have done other odd jobs as well, but he died, of lung cancer, at 45.
Albert Camus died in a car wreck. His publisher drove the Facel Vega coupe.
H.P. Lovecraft’s final book—a novella—published in an intended edition of 400. Only 200 were completed, and those, strewn with errors. A year later, he was dead. Cancer of the small intestine. He’d given his tumor a name: “The grippe.” He was buried beside his parents.
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa spent ten childhood years in Durban, South Africa and wrote much of his earliest work in English. As were his final words: “I know not what tomorrow will bring.”
Bruce Chatwin offered a theory about the illness killing him: a Chinese fungus that travels from bloodstream to bone marrow, with only ten recorded cases, possibly connected to a black egg he’d eaten in Lijiang or perhaps to that Hong Kong bird market. An appropriately exotic way for Bruce Chatwin to go. Not everyone deserves the full truth, but a few friends did. With them, he shared that he’d been diagnosed with what was still called the gay plague.
Salmon Rushdie learned of his fatwa on the day of Bruce Chatwin’s funeral. At the service, Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Paul Theroux sat together nervously.
Douglas Adams died of a heart attack at 49.
Roberto Bolaño died at 50 awaiting a liver transplant.
Raymond Carver smoked himself to death. The years of drinking didn’t help.
In his illustrations, which bore titles like, “Girl with a Briefcase Stepping on a Prostrate Man” and “Maid Flogging a Naked Man with a Birch Whip,” Bruno Schulz often drew himself, small and hunched, groveling at the feet of long-legged, domineering women. His dream, according to a friend, was to die at the cruel hands of a female bombardier. Instead, a Nazi shot him dead in the street.
Marcel Proust died at 51, having spent most of the previous three years confined to his bedroom where he’d write all night, racing to complete Remembrance of Things Past.
Robert Musil eulogized Rilke at his memorial service. Leukemia.
Five days passed between the death of Philip K. Dick’s brain and his body.
William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died within a day of one another.
Emily Dickinson was called back.
Per her instructions, Dickinson’s coffin was carried, rather than driven, though a field of buttercups to the family burial plot.
Clarice Lispector’s last words, shouted in accusation at a nurse: “You killed my character.” The performance was ending at just 56. Ovarian cancer.
Dante, surrounded by his three children but in a foreign city, died of a malarial fever just hours after finishing, or at least putting his finishing touches on, Paradiso.
W. G. Sebald is often said to have died in a car crash, but a heart attack may have done him in, with the crash following immediately thereafter. A few months earlier, he’d described himself as someone who needs to leave before long.
Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey, an honor recognizing his service to the state, not his poetry.
Tu Fu died after a late creative burst that produced as many as 400 poems in his final two years. He was eulogized as a good father, brother, husband, friend, official, and subject.
James Joyce died in Zurich following surgery for a perforated ulcer. When informed, the head of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin inquired whether the notorious blasphemer had died a Catholic and then refused the return of the body to its native land. Joyce remains in exile after all these decades.
Octavia Butler died of a stroke at 58.
Vincent O. Carter was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which he chose not to treat.
Clarice Lispector would not forgive Virginia Woolf for committing suicide. She believed we have a duty to carry this work to its end.
Dostoevsky was not yet 60 when he shook this mortal coil. On his deathbed, he assured his wife he’d never been unfaithful, not even in his thoughts. His funeral attendance is debated. Some say 40,000. Others 100,000, or more.
A third of Li Po’s poems reference the moon, that singular drinking companion. By legend, he died embracing its reflection in a river.
Robert Musil died of a stroke at 61. He’d been vigorously trampolining just before its onset.
Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
In the months before his suicide, Ernest Hemingway underwent two cycles of electroshock therapy in attempts to dislodge his depression. His father, sister, and brother all committed suicide as well.
William Faulkner nearly died after falling from a horse, but he recovered and lived another two years before a heart attack threw him.
At 70 ounces, Turgenev’s brain was notably larger than Whitman’s, which weighed in at 44.
Hunter S. Thompson called it the only logical human act.
Italo Svevo died a few days after a car crash. In his hospital bed, he longed for a last cigarette. His request, denied.
Having described hope as a pitiless, indestructible force that she sought to strangle, Anna Kavan seemed destined for suicide. Instead, a heart attack at 67. When the police came for her body, they found enough heroin in her apartment to kill the entire street, which captures the depth of her addiction, the savvy of her planning, her capacity for restraint.
Lucia Berlin died on her birthday. Like Shakespeare.
The headline of Elizabeth Bishop’s New York Times obituary identifies her as having taught at Harvard. Which was true for a few years at the end of her life, but says far more about The Times than about Bishop, who took the job for money after having done more notable things. It also makes vague reference to the earlier death of a close woman friend, but Lota de Marcedo Soares, with whom Bishop had lived for fifteen years, went unnamed.
It’s not entirely clear when Juan Rulfo was born. The date of his death, January 7, 1986, is more precise, but he kept his mysteries to the end. Heart attack? Lung cancer? Sources vary.
Cavafy died at 70. Cancer of larynx. For months, he’d been unable to speak. A nurse visited each evening to change his tracheotomy tube, and stayed with the poet through the night. When friends agreed he had to be transferred to the hospital, they packed him in a small valise, which brought him to tears. He recognized it as one he’d bought 30 years earlier for a very different trip when he was still young, healthy, and not unattractive.
Tennessee Williams specified in his will that he should be sewn up in a canvas sack and buried at sea as close as possible to the site where Hart Crane drowned.
Tennessee Williams is buried in a St. Louis cemetery near his mother.
Arthur Conan Doyle once said that the secret of his success was that he never forced a story. As he lay dying, surrounded by family, he looked at them one by one. And said nothing.
Thousands lined the streets of Camden for Walt Whitman’s funeral procession. The service featured readings from Christian, Buddhist, Confucian, and Islamic texts. Plato too.
When Herman Melville died, it received notice in The New York Times, which recognized him as the author of “Mobie Dick.” Another obituary noted that many assumed he had died long before.
Gertrude Stein died following stomach cancer surgery. A few versions of her last words exist, but the gist of it is, “if there is no question, then there is no answer.”
Zbigniew Herbert’s last years were hard; he was often bed-bound or limited to a wheelchair, while subject to severe asthmatic attacks.
Patricia Highsmith lived her last decade in Switzerland, much of it in poor health. A notorious skeptic, pessimist, and misanthrope with a taste for antisemitic and racist comments, she reached her peak writing about a murderous sociopath. She published her only optimistic novel under a pseudonym. She died at 74.
When Halley’s Comet returned, it took Mark Twain with it.
At 75, Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize and died.
Edith Wharton died at 5:30 pm on August 11, 1937.
T. S. Eliot’s ashes were scattered 76 years after his birth.
That same year, thousands attended memorial services for Anna Akhmatova in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.
George Oppen died at 76 from Alzheimer’s, or from pneumonia complicated by Alzheimer’s. Mary, with whom he ran away all those years before, was still with him.
After Vladimir Nabokov died of bronchitis in 1977, his wife and son declined his request to burn the half-finished manuscript on his desk. As a result The Original of Laura, which adds little to his legacy, was born in 2009.
Published a year before his death of prostate cancer, J. G. Ballard’s last book was the autobiographical Miracles of Life.
William Carlos Williams had a heart attack at 65 and a series of strokes at 66. He lived to 79.
A year after his death, André Gide was honored by the Catholic Church, which placed his work on its Index of Forbidden Books.
Frederic Prokosch died at 81 from a heart attack. Probably.
David Markson’s two adult children found him dead in the bed of his Greenwich Village apartment.
Félix Fénéon lived an extraordinary life, but there isn’t much to say about his death.
A lifelong junky, Willam S. Burroughs died of a heart attack at 83 in Lawrence, Kansas. He is interred at the family plot in St. Louis under a stone that reads “American Writer.”
Marguerite Yourcenar had no desire to live to the year 2000, and she didn’t.
Odysseus Elytis’s final companion, Sofia Iliopoulou, was 31 when he died.
Georges Simenon went in his sleep.
Borges married, briefly, at 68, and then again to his assistant and companion, Maria Kodama, a few months before his death at 86. The Argentine lies buried in Geneva under a tombstone carved with Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse runes.
In 1999, Gabriel García Márquez was misdiagnosed with lymphatic cancer. In 2000, newspapers reported his impending death. In 2009, his agent said he was unlikely to write again, a claim immediately disputed by his publisher, who insisted Márquez was completing his next book. (Which would, in fact, be published posthumously against Márquez’s wishes.) In 2014, he died of pneumonia at 87.
A lifelong bachelor, Evan S. Connell died in an assisted living facility in Santa Fe.
As a young man, Jack Gilbert imagined his mind to be a kind of paradise furnace that could burn away the inessential. It would allow him to flower by tightening. As an old man, Alzheimer’s took over the work, but it went after the essential and inessential alike. Pittsburgh. Copenhagen. Italy. San Francisco. Greece. Not to mention Gianna. Linda. Michiko. The other places, the other women. Before dying of pneumonia, Gilbert spent his last years living in a rented room in Northampton, Massachusetts. His Collected Poems, spanning six decades and amounting to 400 pages, were published the year of his death.
Elmore Leonard’s tombstone memorializes the Dickens of Detroit.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Jean Rhys is that she lived to 88.
Paul Bowles died of a heart attack in Tangiers. His last journey was a return home. After a lifetime abroad, his ashes were buried in Lakemont, New York, beside the graves of his parents and grandparents.
Joan Didion died of Parkinson’s at 89.
No gun fights. No rattlesnakes. No Judge. No Anton Chigurh. Cormac McCarthy went in his sleep.
After more than forty years in America, Czesław Miłosz returned to Krakow, where he died at 93.
Milan Kundera lived to 94.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Paddy as he was known, is buried in England beneath a tomb with a Greek inscription pronouncing him the best of all things: Hellenic.
