Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath - who was born on October 27th, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. - was an American poet, novelist, and short-story-writer.  After having her first poem published at age eight, Plath had numerous more printed in local publications over the next few years.  At age eleven, she began a journal, and showed early promise as a painter; she was also diagnosed with an I.Q. of around 160.  Raised as a Unitarian, Plath became ambivalent about religion after her father's death when she was eight.  Graduating from high school in 1950, she then attended Smith College in Massachusetts where she became editor of The Smith Review and guest editor of Mademoiselle magazine.  Becoming depressed and angry after failing to meet poet Dylan Thomas at a meeting, Plath slashed her legs to see if she had enough "courage" to kill herself.  Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets on August 24th, 1953.  After six months in psychiatric care, she returned to college, graduating in June of 1955.  She was then awarded a scholarship to Cambridge University in England, where she spent the next two years.  Plath met the English poet Ted Hughes in February, 1956; the two were instantly attracted, and married on June 16th that year in London.  In June of 1957, the couple moved to the U.S.A., where Plath taught at her old college and resumed psychoanalytic treatment for her depression.  They travelled across the U.S.A. and Canada in 1959, returning to live in London, England that December.  Their first child, Frieda, was born on April 1st, 1960, with Plath's first volume of poetry, The Colossus, following in October.  In February, 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, with Plath later claiming that Hughes had beaten her two days earlier.  That August, Plath finished writing (it was published in 1963) her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, before the couple immediately moved to North Tawton in Devon, where Plath gave birth to her second child, Nicholas, in January, 1962.  Plath and Hughes had rented their London flat to two poets, Assia and David Wevill.  Plath had a car crash in June of 1962, which she described as one of many suicide attempts.  In July, she discovered that her husband was having an affair with Assia Wevill, and separated from him in September.  Plath now entered a period of great creativity, writing at least 26 poems between then and February, 1963.  In December of 1962, Plath returned to live in London with her children, her depression worsening during one of the coldest Winters in one-hundred years.  During January of 1963, Plath spoke to her doctor about her depression; he prescribed her anti-depressants, but failed to persuade her to enter hospital, instead arranging for a live-in nurse to help her look after her children.  The nurse tried to gain access to the property on February 11th, 1963, but was initially unable to do so.  With the help of a workman, she eventually broke in, only to discover Plath dead with her head in the gas oven.  She had sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children to prevent them inhaling the fumes.  An inquest ruled that Plath had committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.  On March 16th, 2009, her son, Nicholas - a wildlife biologist - hanged herself after suffering from depression.  Sylvia Plath was just 30 years old.

Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Michael Bourdain - who was born on June 25th, 1956, in Manhatten, New York City, U.S.A. - was an American celebrity chef, author, and documentarian.  The older of two boys born to Gladys and Pierre Bourdain, he described his childhood as being happy and loving.  Whilst on a family holiday in France in his youth, Bourdain tasted his first oyster on a fisherman's boat, which he credits as stimulating his love of food.  After graduating from high school in 1973, Bourdain enrolled at Vassar College in New York, but dropped out after two years.  His interest in cooking was kindled whilst he worked at several seafood restaurants in Massachusetts during his college years, and he subsequently trained at The Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978.  From there, he went on to run several restaurant kitchens in New York City.  Whilst at high school, Bourdain began dating an older girl, Nancy Putkoski, whom he described as "a bad girl" and "part of a druggy crowd"; the pair married in 1985.  Bourdain himself became a regular user of many recreational drugs, from cannabis to heroin.  His first book, a culinary mystery called Bone in the Throat, was published in 1995, but sold poorly, as did the follow-up, Gone Bamboo.  However, subsequent books, all about food as well as his travels around the world, were much more successful.  His 2001 book, A Cook's Tour - written to tie-in with his first television series of the same name - became a bestseller.  Bourdain thereafter hosted many food-themed television programmes, working for the Travel Channel from 2005 to 2013, and for CNN from 2013 to 2018.  He was known for his put-downs of other celebrity chefs, but was quick to praise those he admired.  Smithsonian Magazine described Bourdain as "the original rock star" of the culinary world, and he became known as a "bad boy" of cooking for his frequent use of expletives and sexual references on his No Reservations television show.  After twenty years of marriage, Bourdain divorced from his first wife in 2005, marrying Ottavia Busia in 2007.  Busia bore Bourdain his only child - a daughter named Ariane - that same year.  Previously a heavy smoker, Bourdain gave up cigarettes in 2007 for the benefit of his daughter's health, but started smoking again towards the end of his life.  Although Busia sometimes travelled with Bourdain, and even appeared in a few of his T.V. shows, the strain of Bourdain being away filming 250 days a year put a strain on the relationship, resulting in the couple separating in 2016, after which Bourdain entered into a relationship with Italian actress, Asia Argento.  In 1998, Bourdain became executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles restaurant in Manhatten, but the business went bankrupt in 2017.  In early June of 2018, Bourdain was in Strasbourg, France, filming an episode of his Parts Unknown programme.  On June 8th, his friend Eric Ripert became concerned that Bourdain had missed breakfast and dinner.  Ripert subsequently found Bourdain hanging in his room at the Le Chambard hotel in Kayersberg, near the city of Colmar, from an apparent suicide.  An inquest heard that Bourdain's body contained no traces of narcotics, and his suicide appeared to be an impulsive act.  Anthony Bourdain was 61 years old.

Chris Morgan

Christopher Morgan - who was born on July 29th, 1952, in Cardiff, Wales, U.K. - was a Welsh journalist and television- and radio-presenter. Educated at Cardiff High School, and at Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan, he was the oldest of four children born to parents who were both bank cashiers. Following sixth-form, Morgan attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he stood as a Labour Party candidate for the local authority, as well as becoming treasurer of the National Union of Students. After graduating with a Master of Theology degree in 1976, he moved into the media the following year by joining the BBC's Religious department. In 1978, he began training as a journalist at BBC Wales, working as a reporter and presenter on both radio and television, eventually becoming one of the main presenters on the flagship BBC Wales news programme, Wales Today. A committed Anglo-Catholic Christian, Morgan was a close friend of the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and was best man at Williams's wedding in 1981. Moving to London in 1990, Morgan became a reporter for Thames News and TV-AM; whilst also, for seven years between 1990 and 1997, presenting the Radio 4 Sunday-morning programme, Sunday, which focused on religious and moral issues. Morgan was appointed Religious Affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times in 1997, a post he held until his death. From the year 2000, he began contributing to a number of television news programmes on religious affairs, and appeared regularly on BBC News 24, Sky News, and CNN. In 2005, Morgan's mother - to whom he was very close, and whom he telephoned at least three times a day - passed away. Without a wife or children to depend on for support (Morgan never married), he began to become quite depressed, although he seemed to keep much of his sadness to himself, and managed to maintain a facade of competent professionalism. However, by 2007, Morgan began to suffer from bouts of depression, for which he sought psychiatric help, even being sectioned at one point. He became more reclusive, often not returning phone calls or e-mails. In the Spring of 2008, Morgan contributed a couple of articles to The Sunday Times, this return to productivity leading friends to believe he was returning to some measure of good health. Sadly, his recovery was shortlived, as - on the afternoon of Friday, May 30th, 2008 - Morgan's body was found by British Transport Police on the track at Kings Langley railway station in Hertfordshire, having been in collision with a Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston train. His death was ruled a suicide. Chris Morgan was 55 years old.

Robin Douglas-Home

Cecil Robin Douglas-Home - who was born on May 8th, 1932, in London, England - was an English-born Scottish aristocrat, jazz pianist, and author.  He was the eldest son of the Honourable Henry Douglas-Home from his first marriage to Lady Margaret Spencer; the nephew of the former British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home; and the older brother of Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of The Times newspaper.  Douglas-Home was a jazz pianist and a leading society figure in the 1950s and '60s.  In the 1950s, he had a relationship with Princess Margaretha of Sweden, but was apparently refused permission to marry her by her mother, Princess Sibylla.  However, Margaretha's nanny later stated in her memoirs that the reason for the couple's breakup was simply that the princess did not want to marry him.  Douglas-Home instead married the 18-year-old fashion model Sandra Paul in 1959, and in 1962 they had a son, Sholto, who was conceived at Frank Sinatra's mansion in Palm Springs, Florida.  A talented writer, Douglas-Home was invited by Sinatra to write his first authorised biography, which was published in 1962, and he subsequently wrote four novels, the first of which, Hot for Certainties, won the Authors' Club's Best First Novel Award in 1964.  He also wrote articles for journals and magazines such as Queen and Woman's Own.  Shortly after the birth of his son, Douglas-Home fathered a son by Nicolette Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the Marchioness of Londonderry, the truth about which would remain secret until the late 1990s.  In 1965, Douglas-Home divorced his wife, the breakup being the subject of a documentary by Alan Whicker.  Around this time, he began a relationship with Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II.  Margaret was at this time concerned about the deterioration of her own marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon, and sought solace in a one-month affair with Douglas-Home.  Their liaison ended rather abruptly, when the princess decided to try to salvage her relationship with Snowdon.  Eighteen months after his split with princess Margaret, and having suffered with clinical depression for some years, Robin Douglas-Home took his own life on October 15th, 1968, at his country home in West Chiltington, West Sussex, England.  He was just 36 years old.

Sarah Kane

Sarah Marie Kane was an English playwright, whose plays deal with the themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture, and death.  Born on February 3rd, 1971, in Brentwood, Essex, England, she produced five plays, one short film (Skin), and two articles for The Guardian newspaper.  A committed Christian in her teenage years, Kane later rejected those beliefs.  She worked briefly as literary associate for the Bush Theatre, London, and for a year was writer-in-residence for Paines Plough, a theatre company promoting new writing.  A lesbian, Kane suffered from severe depression for many years, and was twice voluntarily admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London.  Two days after taking an overdose of prescription drugs, Kane hanged herself by her shoelaces - on February 20th, 1999 - in a bathroom at King's College Hospital in Camberwell, London, England. She was 28 years old.

Revilo P. Oliver

Revilo Pendleton Oliver was an American professor of classical philology, Spanish, and Italian, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Born on July 7th, 1908, in Corpus Christi, Texas, U.S.A., he later became a writer, becoming known as a polemicist for white-nationalist and right-wing causes. Oliver attracted national notoriety in the 1960s, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when he wrote an article suggesting that Kennedy's murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was part of a Soviet conspiracy against the United States, for which he was called to testify before the Warren Commission investigating the murder.  On August 20th, 1994, suffering from leukemia and extreme emphysema, Oliver committed suicide in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 86.

Leicester Hemingway

Leicester Clarence Hemingway was an American writer.  Born on April 1st, 1915, in Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.A., he was the youngest of six siblings, his older brother being the writer, Ernest Hemingway.  Leicester Hemingway wrote six books, including his first novel, The Sound of the Trumper, in 1953, based on his experiences in France and Germany during World War II.  In 1961, he published a well-received biography of his brother - My Brother, Ernest Hemingway.  This book brought Leicester recognition in his own right as a writer, as well as significant financial rewards.  In July, 1964, with the money earned from his work, Hemingway created the micronation of New Atlantis on a barge 12 miles off the coast of Jamaica.  He utilised the 1856 Guano Islands Act to claim half of the barge as a new nation, and half for the United States.  Hemingway also "wrote" a constitution, which was a copy of the U.S. Constitution with the words "New Atlantis" substituted for "United States".  New Atlantis's purpose was to generate money for oceanographic research by selling coins and stamps.  In 1966, the micronation was ravaged by a storm and then ransacked by fishermen.  After suffering for some years from Type II diabetes, which necessitated several amputations, Leicester Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself in the head on September 13th, 1982.  His sister, Ursula, his brother, Ernest, as well as Ernest's grand-daughter, Margaux Hemingway, also committed suicide.  He was 67 years old.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American writer, who was born in Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.A., on July 21st, 1899. Renowned for an economical and understated writing style, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.  Hemingway almost died after two plane crashes in 1952, which left him in pain and ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway - whose brother, Leicester, and sister, Ursula, also committed suicide - killed himself with a shotgun in the early-morning hours of July 2nd, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, U.S.A.  He was 61 years old.