October 1, 1941: 52-year-old Aline Murray Kilmer, herself a poet and also the widow of Joyce Kilmer, a poet killed in World War One, dies following three years of an unknown, but excruciatingly painful, illness.
October 1, 1951: Journalist Pauline Pfeiffer dies at age 56 of acute shock. She had a rare pheochromocytoma tumor on one of her adrenal glands. It appears that when Pauline’s transgender daughter Gloria was arrested for using a women’s bathroom and Gloria’s father Ernest Hemingway called his ex-wife Pauline to tell her, the news of Gloria’s arrest caused Pauline’s adrenal tumor to produce the hormones that caused the fatal state of physical shock.
October 2, 2018: Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, who resides in the U.S., is murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi’s writings were critical of the Saudi government, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is suspected of being involved in the assassination.
October 3, 1849: On this election day, Edgar Allan Poe is given alcohol and marched from polling place to polling place in an illegal voting scam that was popular at the time. It may have contributed to his death four days later.
October 4, 1951: Henrietta Lacks passes away from complications of cervical cancer. She had been treated with radiation therapy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. As a result of her cancer and/or the radiation, her organs failed. After her death and without her knowledge or consent, Lacks’ cancerous cells will be collected and used to start an “immortal” cell line that will be used in most of the major medical research of the 20th century.
October 4, 1974: Poet Anne Sexton dies by suicide in her car, locked inside her garage, by carbon monoxide poisoning. She is 45 years old.
October 5, 1995: 50-year-old voice actor Linda Gary, who provided an impressive number of cartoon characters with their voices in American animation of the ‘70s and ‘80s, dies of brain cancer.
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| Linda Gary is mentioned in this novel. https://amzn.to/3rUIsfh |
October 7, 1849: In Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe dies.
October 7, 1992: The last fluent speaker of the Ubykh language, Tevfik Esenç, dies at the age of 88. The Ubykh people are a subset of the Circassian people, who were the victims of ethnic cleansing by the Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries.
October 10, 1901: 23-year-old David Park Barnit, a poet of the Decadent school of poetry, dies suddenly of what newspapers describe as “an enlarged heart.” Some suspect this may be a cover story and that the young poet may have taken his own life.
October 12, 1943: Poet Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, best known as Robert Lowell or Robert Lowell, Jr., is sentenced to a year in prison for draft evasion for being a conscientious objector to service in World War II.
October 19, 1950: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, age 58, dies after apparently suffering a heart attack and falling down the stairs of her home.
October 20, 1728: The Copenhagen Fire of 1728 begins and burns through October 23rd. It destroys nearly a third of the city’s buildings, leaving approximately 20% of Copenhagen’s population homeless. The University of Copenhagen library loses approximately 35,000 texts.
October 21, 1969: Jack Kerouac dies of internal abdominal hemorrhage caused by his heavy alcohol use. He is 47 years old.
October 22, 2009: The county government of Zhenyuan, Gansu province, China, announces on social media that it has burned 65 “illegal publications” outside of a local library. It describes the books as either “religious” or displaying “leanings,” presumably leanings that tend to disagree with the Chinese government.
On the same day, in the United States, novelist/blogger Mac Tonnies dies at age 34 of a cardiac arrhythmia.
October 23, 1731: Fire breaks out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, England. The house holds the Cotton Library, a collection of books and historical documents gifted to the British Crown by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, a Member of Parliament who died in 1631. The fire destroys 13 manuscripts and damages 200 others. The Nowell Codex, the single manuscript on which the Epic of Beowulf is recorded, is among those damaged.
October 24, 2010: Pan Jin-yu dies at the age of 96 in Taiwan. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Pazeh language.
October 28, 1991: The commercial fishing boat Andrea Gail is lost amid the so-called Perfect Storm weather event that began with Hurricane Grace, formed on October 26th. The boat sinks with six crew members aboard near Sable Island, Canada. Their bodies are never recovered. In all, the Perfect Storm claims 13 lives.
October 31, 1871: Emily and Mary Wilde, the older half-sisters of Oscar Wilde, attend a Halloween party at Drumacon House near Ulster, Ireland. During the last dance of the evening, Mary gets too close to a candlestick and catches her dress on fire. Emily, too, catches her dress on fire as she rushes to help her sister. Party host Andrew Reid leads the women outside in the hope that the snow would help them extinguish the flames, but both sisters die of their injuries, Mary (age 22) on November 9th and Emily (age 24) on November 21st.
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