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:
“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)
“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)
“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)