Deaths
- January 11 – Richmal Crompton, "Just William" author, 78
- March 11 – John Wyndham, British science fiction novelist, 65
- March 26 – John Kennedy Toole, novelist, 31 (suicide)
- March 27 – B. Traven, novelist, age unknown
- May 4 – Osbert Sitwell, novelist, poet, brother of Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell, 76
- July 24 – Witold Gombrowicz, playwright and novelist, 64
- July 27 – Vivian de Sola Pinto, poet and memoirist, 73
- August 14 – Leonard Woolf, political theorist and husband of Virginia Woolf, 88
- September 6 – Gavin Maxwell, naturalist and author, 55 (cancer)
- September 17 – Greye La Spina, dramatist and short story writer, 89
- September 20 – Elinor Brent-Dyer, Chalet School author, 75
- October 21 – Jack Kerouac, author, 47 (internal haemorrhage)
Read more about this topic: 1969 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)
“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)