Deaths
- January 3 - Edwin Muir, poet, novelist and translator, 71
- January 29 - Pauline Smith, novelist, 76
- February 22 - Percy F. Westerman, children's author, 82
- February 23 - Luis Palés Matos, Puerto Rican poet, 60 (heart failure)
- February 28 - Maxwell Anderson, playwright, film writer, 70
- March 17 - Galaktion Tabidze, Georgian poet, 66 (suicide by jumping from window)
- March 22 - Olga Knipper, Russian actress, widow of Anton Chekhov and star of many of his plays, 90
- March 26 - Raymond Chandler, crime novelist, 70
- April 14 - Julien Josephson, screenwriter, 77
- May 18 - Apsley Cherry-Garrard, explorer and memoirist, 73
- May 20 - Alfred Schütz, philosopher and sociologist, 60
- June 1 - Sax Rohmer, novelist, 76
- June 23 - Boris Vian, French novelist, 39 (heart attack)
- June 30 - José Vasconcelos, Mexican poet and political writer, 77
- July 3 - Johan Bojer, Norwegian novelist, 87
- July 26 - Manuel Altolaguirre, Spanish poet, editor and publisher, member of the Generation of '27, 54 (car accident)
- August 8 - Emil František Burian, Czech poet, journalist, singer, actor, musician, composer, dramatic adviser, playwright and director, 55
- September 18 - Benjamin Péret, poet and a founder of the Surrealist movement, 60
Read more about this topic: 1959 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes,
they waste their deaths on us.”
—C.D. Andrews (1913–1992)
“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)
“This is the 184th Demonstration.
...
What we do is not beautiful
hurts no one makes no one desperate
we do not break the panes of safety glass
stretching between people on the street
and the deaths they hire.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)