Passing Strange: 15 Of The Most Bizarre Author Deaths On Record

By Joshua Chaplinsky

Why go gently into that good night like a sucker when you can go out in a Bon Jovian blaze of glory and be remembered forever? If you’re a 16th century poet or an obscure opera critic, it might be your only chance at leaving a lasting legacy. And if you’re already a canonical author, it doesn’t hurt your street cred if you die in a fiery car wreck and people blame the KGB.

The authors on this list share a common bond; death was their final indignity. Many of these accounts already exist online, but I humbly submit that none are as colorful as my own. I made a conscious choice not to include any of the famous suicides- Virginia Woolf putting rocks in her pockets, Sylvia Plath putting her head in the oven, Hemingway putting buckshot in his brain- so no need to point out their absence. I was more interested in the accidental, the grotesque, the downright kooky. And I think these 15 deaths more than fit those criteria.

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Will Streep, Mirren, or Turner Star in Premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Final Play?

Photo by Jack Mitchell

By Jeremy Kinser

The last play written by Tennessee Williams, which tells of the world’s richest woman, her gay husband, and his young lover, will finally be produced in April in New York possibly starring Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, or Anjelica Huston, according to New York Post‘s Michael Riedel.

Williams, who won nearly every award for his plays, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, was working on In Masks Outrageous and Austere when he died unexpectedly in 1983

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