Curated playlist
1936 deaths
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry…
- Irving ThalbergIrving Thalberg was twenty years old when Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, told him to take charge of the entire Los Angeles studio. In shock, Thalberg replied, "I'm what?" The young man already carried a death sentence. As…
- Elsa EinsteinElsa Einstein entered the world on the 18th of January 1876 in the town of Hechingen. Her father Rudolf worked as a textile manufacturer there. She grew up with two sisters named Paula and Hermine. Regular visits to Munich brought her into…
- John Francis HylanJohn Francis Hylan arrived in New York City in the winter of 1887 with $3.50 in his pocket, a few sets of clothes, and a $2 train ticket. He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, saw men building an elevated railroad, climbed onto the…
- Luigi PirandelloLuigi Pirandello arrived in Rome on a hard, rainy night and felt, by his own account, that his heart was being crushed. Then he laughed, like a man in the throes of desperation. That desperate laugh became a key to everything he would…
- Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard died on the morning of the 11th of June 1936 at age thirty, having first asked a nurse whether his mother would ever wake from her coma. When she told him no, he walked to his car in the driveway, retrieved a .380 Colt…
- Rasmus B. AndersonRasmus Bjørn Anderson was born on the 12th of January 1846 in the Town of Albion, Dane County, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents who had crossed the Atlantic as part of a small band of Quaker sympathizers. His father died of…
- Marcel GrossmannMarcel Grossmann was born on the 9th of April, 1878, in Budapest, into a Jewish family that had deep roots in the Swiss city of Zurich. His father managed a textile factory. His family background seems worlds away from the frontiers of…
- Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox priest. The name Pavlov is today shorthand for an automatic, almost mechanical…
- Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a…
- Alexander GlazunovAlexander Glazunov stood at the podium in Paris on the 17th of May 1907 to conduct the last of the Russian Historical Concerts, a man at the absolute peak of his fame. That same year, Oxford and Cambridge each awarded him an honorary…
- Miguel de UnamunoMiguel de Unamuno died on the 31st of December 1936, the last day of the last year of his life, under house arrest in Salamanca. He was seventy-two years old, a former rector of the university he had served for decades, and he had spent…