Deaths
- January 28 - William Butler Yeats, poet (born 1865)
- February 18 - Okamoto Kanoko, tanka poet
- February 22 - Antonio Machado, Spanish poet (born 1875)
- March 7 - Ludwig Fulda, German poet and playwright (born 1862)
- March 23 - Richard Halliburton, travel writer
- April 11 - S. S. Van Dine, crime fiction writer (born 1888)
- May 23 - Margarete Böhme, German novelist
- May 27 - Joseph Roth, novelist
- June 26 - Ford Madox Ford, novelist (born 1873)
- July 8 - Havelock Ellis, sexual psychologist and controversial writer (born 1859)
- September - Ethel M. Dell, romantic novelist
- September 6 - Arthur Rackham, book illustrator
- October 23 - Zane Grey, popular author of westerns (born 1872)
- December 2 - Llewelyn Powys, biographer and autobiographer
- unknown date - Solomon Cleaver, storyteller and novelist
Read more about this topic: 1939 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)