Complex Numbers

Inevitable

"’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes."
         -Christopher Bullock, 1716

The Notorious Legends and Dubious Stories of 10 Literary Deaths  
Whose clothes were those, Poe?

The above quote about "death and taxes" is probably more famously ascribed to Ben Franklin, who died at the age of 84 and whose last words were reportedly, "a dying man can do nothing easy."

84 is a good run now, let alone in the 18th century. But whether 84 or 24, most deaths pass unremarked by the general public... unless the corpse was a famous figure in life.

Most of us don't choose the time and place of our demise, with notable exceptions such as Hunter S. Thompson. But the article linked above details some of the odd passings experienced by famous writers.

Fair warning: the best ones are from the Greeks. Obviously!

But yes, Poe is in there.

At least one source claims that Evelyn Waugh died “after attending an upsettingly modern Easter Mass,” but others suggest it was just the opposite...

I had to look up who Waugh was, because I'd never even heard of him. More interesting than his death was that he married a woman who was also named Evelyn.

The death of Poe is a long-standing mystery.

A lot of people didn't like the movie The Raven, the 2012 one with John Cusack. This is a real shame, because I think most viewers missed the point -- which was to make Poe's death (the events of the movie were clearly a dream or hallucination) something heroic. Still, it's fiction -- as is appropriate, I suppose.

They promised us Greeks, so here's Aeschylus:

He went outside the walls of the Sicilian city in which he was staying and sat down in a sunny spot. An eagle flying over with a tortoise in its talons mistook his shiny bald head for a stone. It dropped the tortoise on Aeschylus’s head, so that it could break its shell and eat its flesh. By that blow the source and beginning of tragedy in its more powerful form was extinguished.

Makes you wonder if, had he lived, he'd have invented gravity long before Newton.

[Francis] Bacon died of pneumonia in 1626, but according to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, his illness was the result of a bizarre experiment to find out if “flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt.”

Appropriate for someone named Bacon.

Camus died in a car crash. Simple enough, right? ...Apparently, Camus once said that the most absurd way to die was in a car accident.

I can think of far more absurd ways to die, but most of them involve alcohol and maybe prostitutes.

As the story goes, Li [Bai] was drunkenly boating on the Yangtze River, and became so enamored of the moon’s reflection on the water that he tried to embrace it—and promptly drowned. A fitting death for a poet, amirite?

Or, you know... that. Or getting beaned by a turtle.

Common knowledge has it that Christopher Marlowe died in a bar fight—stabbed in the eye after a dispute over the tab, no less. But is that really what happened?

I mean, really, what's this one doing here?

We all know that Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap, but perhaps like me, you’ve always wondered: well, how?

Hey, now, we've all had that drunken escapade wherein we forget to take the cap off a bottle of beer before slugging it down. Most of us haven't died from that, though. Yet.

Less than a month before his 30th birthday, the lyric poet and husband of Mary Shelley drowned when his sailboat was caught in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia.

I like how he's taking second fiddle to his wife here.

But the really good legend is this: that after Shelley’s body washed up on shore, it was cremated—but his heart refused to burn. The story goes that Edward Trelawny plucked the unburnt heart from the pyre and took it home to Mary Shelley, and it was eventually buried with their son.

At least she didn't take her own literature too seriously, or we'd have Frankenpercy right now.

Here’s another tragedian of ancient Greece who supposedly died in an extravagant manner—legend has it that Euripides was torn apart by wild dogs.

Really? Only the second Greek on the list and it's a probably apocryphal story about wild dogs? Come on, there have to be better literary death stories than this. Which means it's time for a...

Merit Badge Mini-Contest!

Know any good -- by which I mean bad -- death stories? You don't have to limit it to famous writers; anyone moderately-to-well-known will do. The one I like best (which will probably be the most ironic one, or the funniest, and yes, death can be funny) will earn the commenter a Merit Badge. So no ordinary ones or depressing ones like the many entertainers who committed suicide, please. Deadline, as always, is the end of the day today, Saturday June 12, WDC time