Deaths
- January 10 - Dashiell Hammett, crime writer and screenwriter, 66 (lung cancer)
- January 21 - Blaise Cendrars, Swiss novelist and poet, 73
- January 30 - Dorothy Thompson, influential journalist, 67
- May 26 - William Troy, writer and teacher, 57 (cancer)
- June 2 - George S. Kaufman, dramatist and critic, 71
- July 2 - Ernest Hemingway, novelist, 61 (suicide)
- July 12 - Mazo de la Roche, novelist, 82
- July 17 - Olga Forsh, Russian dramatist, novelist and memoirist, 88
- September 27 - H.D., poet, novelist and memoirist, 75
- October 19 - Mihail Sadoveanu, Romanian novelist, 80
- November 2 - James Thurber, humorist, 66
- December 7 - Roussan Camille, Haitian poet and journalist, 49
Read more about this topic: 1961 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances ...”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)
“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)