On this day in 1375 Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular, Giovanni Boccaccio died at the age of sixty-two in Certaldo, Tuscany, Italy, where he is buried. Other notable works include Filostrato and Teseida (the sources for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale, respectively), Filocolo, a prose version of an existing French romance and the source for Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and La caccia di Diana, a poem in terza rima listing Neapolitan women.
On this day in 1940, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, died from a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 44. Born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on 24 September 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota into an Irish Catholic family. Named after his famous second cousin Francis Scott Key, three times removed. Fitzgerald attended Princeton University. He and his wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald helped define the Jazz Age, a term he coined. In my opinion, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He finished four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night and his most famous, the celebrated classic, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon was published posthumously. He and Zelda married in 1920. At the time of his death he was living with his lover Sheilah Graham.
The Final Footprint – Fitzgerald was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland. Zelda died in 1948, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan worked to overturn the Archdiocese of Baltimore ruling that Fitzgerald died a non practicing Catholic, so that he could be at rest at the Roman Catholic cemetery where his father’s family was laid. Both Scott’s and Zelda’s remains were moved to the family plot in Saint Mary’s Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland in 1975. Their graves are marked by a large companion marble monument and a marble full ledger. The inscription on the ledger is the last line from his novel, The Great Gatsby; SO WE BEAT ON, BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT, BORNE BACK CEASELESSLY INTO THE PAST. – The Great Gatsby. A cenotaph, in memoriam, is placed at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda’s hometown.
On this day in 1964, writer and artistic photographer Carl Van Vechten died in New York City at the age of 84. Born June 17, 1880 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. In his later years, he took up photography and took many portraits of notable people.
Van Vechten met Stein in Paris in 1913. He became a devoted friend and champion of Stein and was considered to be one of Stein’s most enthusiastic fans. They continued corresponding for the remainder of Stein’s life, and, at her death, she appointed Van Vechten her literary executor; he helped to bring into print her unpublished writings. Acollection of the letters between Van Vechten and Stein has been published
By the start of the 1930s and at the age of 50, Van Vechten took up photography, using his apartment at 150 West 55th Street as a studio, where he photographed many notable people.
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Van Vechten was cremated and his cremains were scattered over Shakespeare Gardens, Central Park, Manhattan. He was the subject of a 1968 biography by Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades, as well as Edward White’s 2014 biography, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.
Gallery
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Marian Anderson, 1940
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Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, 1939
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Pierre Balmainand Ruth Ford, 1947
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Tallulah Bankhead, 1934
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James Baldwin, 1955
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Harry Belafonte, 1954
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Karen von Blixen-Finecke, 1959
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Clare Booth Luce, 1932
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Marlon Brando, 1948
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Truman Capote, 1948
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Katharine Cornell, 1933
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Gloria Davy, 1958
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Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1934
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John Gielgud as Richard II, 1936
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William Faulkner, 1954
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Lynn Fontanne, 1932
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Ben Gazzara, 1955
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Dizzy Gillespie, 1955
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Martha Graham and Bertram Ross, 1961
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W. C. Handy, 1941
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Billie Holiday, 1949
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Marilyn Horne and Henry Lewis, 1961
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Mahalia Jackson, 1962
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Philip Johnson, 1933
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Philip Johnson, 1963
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Eartha Kitt, 1952
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Fernand Léger, 1936
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Hugh Laing(left), 1940
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Lotte Lenya, 1962
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Joe Louis, 1941
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Alfred Lunt, 1932
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Henri Matisse, 1933
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Elsa Maxwell, 1935
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Gian Carlo Menotti, 1944
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Francisco Moncion, 1947
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Robert Morse, 1958
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Laurence Olivier, 1939
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Christopher Plummer, 1959
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José Quintero, 1958
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Cesar Romero, 1934
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Arthur Schwartz, 1933
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Bessie Smith, 1936
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W. Somerset Maugham, 1934
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Gertrude Stein, 1935
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James Stewart, 1934
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Paul Taylor, 1960
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Pavel Tchelitchew, 1934
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Virgil Thomson, 1947
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Antony Tudor, 1941
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Gore Vidal, 1948
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Hugh Walpole, 1934
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Ethel Waters, 1938
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Evelyn Waugh, 1940
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Orson Welles, 1937
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Anna May Wong, 1939
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George Zoritch, 1942
0 R
On this day in 1992, blues guitarist and singer Albert King died from a heart attack at his Memphis home at the age of 69. Born Albert Nelson on April 25, 1923 in Indianola, Mississippi. His playing influenced many other blues guitarists. Perhaps best known for the popular and influential album Born Under a Bad Sign (1967) and its title track.
He was known as “The Velvet Bulldozer” because of his smooth singing and large size—he stood taller than average, with sources reporting 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) or 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m), and weighed 250 lb (110 kg)—and also because he drove a bulldozer in one of his day jobs early in his career.
King was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in May 2013.
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King was given a funeral procession with the Memphis Horns playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and was buried in Paradise Gardens Cemetery in Edmondson, Arkansas, near his childhood home. B.B. King delivered a eulogy, stating, “Albert wasn’t my brother in blood, but he was my brother in blues.”
And on this day in 2014 actress, muse who worked in close collaboration with Irish playwright Samuel Beckett for 25 years and was regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of his works, also known for her portrayal of Mrs. Baylock, the demonic nanny in the 1976 horror film The Omen, Billie Whitelaw died as a resident of Denville Hall, the actors’ retirement and nursing home in Northwood, Hillingdon, England from pneumonia at the age of 82. Born Billie Honor Whitelaw on 6 June 1932 in Coventry, Warwickshire, England.
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