List: Writers who committed suicide

by likeorhate

•  Ernest Hemingway

  Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American writer and journalist. During his lifetime he had seven novels, six collections of short stories, and two works of non-fiction published, with a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction autobiographical works published after his death.

  

  37.1%
  

  22.9%
  

  40.0%
  
•  Gilles Deleuze

  Gilles Deleuze, (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari.

  

  31.4%
  

  25.7%
  

  42.9%
  
•  Hunter S. Thompson

  Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author, most famous for his roman à clef Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is also known for his use of psychedelics, alcohol, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism.

  

  36.7%
  

  22.4%
  

  40.8%
  
•  Jerzy Kosinski

  Jerzy Kosiński (June 14, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was an award-winning Polish-American novelist, best known for the novels The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1971), the latter of which was adapted into a film in 1979.

  

  46.4%
  

  25.0%
  

  28.6%
  
•  John William Polidori

  John William Polidori (7 September 1795 – 24 August 1821) was an English writer and physician of Italian descent. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the 1819 short story, The Vampyre, the first vampire story in English. Although originally and erroneously accredited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the story is Polidori's.

  

  33.3%
  

  44.4%
  

  22.2%
  
•  James Tiptree, Jr.

  James Tiptree, Jr. (August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987) was the pen name of American science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon, used from 1967 to her death. She also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (1974–77). Tiptree/Sheldon was most notable for breaking down the barriers between writing perceived as inherently "male" or "female" — it was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree, Jr. was a woman.

  

  42.1%
  

  23.7%
  

  34.2%
  
•  Marina Tsvetaeva

  Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet and writer.

  

  25.6%
  

  28.2%
  

  46.2%
  
•  Robert E. Howard

  Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is regarded as the father of the Sword and Sorcery genre and he created, amongst other characters, Conan the Cimmerian. Howard was born and raised in the state of Texas. He spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains with some time spent in the nearby Brownwood.

  

  44.4%
  

  33.3%
  

  22.2%
  
•  Sylvia Plath

  Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author. Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York.

  

  71.4%
  

  28.6%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Virginia Woolf

  Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

  

  58.8%
  

  29.4%
  

  11.8%
  
•  Primo Levi

  Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919–11 April 1987) was a Jewish-Italian chemist and writer. He is best known for If This Is a Man, published in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. It has been described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

  

  33.3%
  

  37.0%
  

  29.6%
  
•  David Foster Wallace

  David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006). Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."

  

  0.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  Marcus Annaeus Lucanus

  

  100.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Georg Trakl

  Georg Trakl (3 February 1887, Waagplatz 2, Salzburg – 3 November 1914, Kraków) was an Austrian poet.

  

  33.3%
  

  66.7%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Hannelore Kohl

  Hannelore Kohl (March 7, 1933 – July 5, 2001) was the wife of former German Chancellor Dr. Helmut Kohl. She met him for the first time at a prom in Ludwigshafen, Germany, when she was 15 years old. She was born in Berlin and was christened Johanna Klara Eleonore Renner. Later, she chose the composition "Hannelore" to be used as her first name. In the years of her husband's chancellorship, she founded the Hannelore Kohl Stiftung and the Kuratorium ZNS.

  

  33.3%
  

  66.7%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Lao She

  Lao She was a notable Chinese writer. A novelist and dramatist, he was one of the most significant figures of 20th century Chinese literature, and is perhaps best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse (茶館). He was of Manchu ethnicity.

  

  0.0%
  

  66.7%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Eli Siegel

  Eli Siegel (August 16, 1902–November 8, 1978) was a poet and critic who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism in 1941. He wrote an award-winning poem, "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana", in 1925.

  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Seneca the Younger

  Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca, or Seneca the Younger) (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero. He was later forced to commit suicide for complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate this last of the Julio-Claudian emperors; however, he may have been innocent.

  

  0.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Romain Gary

  Romain Gary (8 May 1914 – 2 December 1980) was a French novelist, film director, World War II aviator and diplomat.

  

  33.3%
  

  50.0%
  

  16.7%
  
•  Stefan Zweig

  Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.

  

  0.0%
  

  57.1%
  

  42.9%
  
•  Yukio Mishima

  Yukio Mishima was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威, Hiraoka Kimitake, January 14, 1925–November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet and playwright, also remembered for his ritual suicide by seppuku.

  

  0.0%
  

  25.0%
  

  75.0%
  
•  John Kennedy Toole

  John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937–March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole's novels remained unpublished during his lifetime. Some years after Toole's suicide, his mother Thelma Toole brought the manuscript to the attention of the novelist Walker Percy, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  

  60.0%
  

  40.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935) was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle.

  

  12.5%
  

  0.0%
  

  87.5%
  
•  Vilhelm Moberg

  Vilhelm Moberg (20 August 1898 - 8 August 1973) was a Swedish author and historian, most commonly associated with his four novels (tetralogy) known as The Emigrants Series.

  

  0.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  Kurt Tucholsky

  Kurt Tucholsky (January 9, 1890 – December 21, 1935) was a German-Jewish journalist, satirist and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel. Born in Berlin-Moabit, he moved to Paris in 1924 and then to Sweden in 1930. Tucholsky was one of the most important journalists of the Weimar Republic.

  

  50.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  50.0%