Writers' Death Roster
John Berryman - Jumped off a bridge in Minneapolis to his death, but missed the water and hit the embankment.
Hart Crane - Committed suicide by jumping overboard from a steamer in the Caribbean.
Ernest Hemingway - Committed suicide by shooting himself; it was the same shotgun that his father had used in his own suicide.
Robert Lowell - On his way to the airport Lowell had a heart attack and died in the taxi he was riding in. The driver thought he was asleep.
Yukio Mishima - Performed hara-kiri after kidnapping a Japanese offical. His follower missed the first time he tried to decapitate Mishima, slicing up his back. The second try was successful.
Sylvia Plath - Tried to commit suicide several times (once, as an adolescence, by taking a bottle of pills and hiding under the stairs), ultimately succeeded when she put her head in an oven (died from the gas, not heat) after Ted Hughes left her for another woman (his lover committed suicide the same way a few years later).
Byron Herbert Reece - Shot himself in the chest at his apartment at Young-Harris College after painfully battling tuberculosis.
Anne Sexton - Killed herself by turning her car on in the garage, while listening to music, drinking alcohol, and wearing a "bear-like" fur coat.
Percy Bysse Shelly - While sailing on a boat with a friend, another boater warned him of an approaching storm. Shelly ignored the boater, and his body was found washed on the shore days later.
Dylan Thomas - A heavy drinker, became weak when working on Under Milk Wood in New York. Was given an ACTH shot and told not to drink but went out for straight whiskies later that night. He was given more injections of ACTH and morphine, but went into a coma and was hospitalized. He died from pneumonia he contracted while in a coma.
Virginia Woolf - This modern novelist suffered a mental breakdown during World War I. When she felt it might return in 1941 she collected rocks, stuffed them in her coat pockets, and then she walked into the River Over where she drowned.