Curated playlist
1937 deaths
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died on the 15th of March 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island, virtually unknown to the reading public. He was 46 years old, hospitalized with terminal cancer of the small intestine, and had spent his final weeks keeping a…
- John D. RockefellerJohn Davison Rockefeller Sr. once said, "Competition is a sin." By 1900 the company he built, Standard Oil, controlled about 90 percent of the nation's oil production. He was born on the 8th of July 1839 into a large family in Upstate New…
- George GershwinGeorge Gershwin's last words were "Fred Astaire." He spoke them on the night of the 9th of July 1937, as he collapsed in a borrowed house in Beverly Hills, working on the score of The Goldwyn Follies. He was 38. Two days later, in the…
- Maurice RavelMaurice Ravel was born on the 7th of March 1875 in Ciboure, a Basque town in France less than 20 kilometres from the Spanish border. By the time he reached his fifties, he was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.…
- Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford was born on the 30th of August 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand, the fourth of twelve children, and he died with a burial spot beside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey. That journey from a farm in rural…
- Heinrich Jacob GoldschmidtHeinrich Jacob Goldschmidt was born on the 12th of April 1857 in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and he died on the 20th of September 1937 in Oslo. Between those two dates, he crossed borders repeatedly, building a career…
- Austen ChamberlainAusten Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, yet never became prime minister. He served in Parliament for 45 years, led his party, and shaped European diplomacy in its most dangerous decade since Napoleon. And still, history has…
- Alfred AdlerAlfred Adler was born on the 7th of February 1870 at Mariahilfer Strasse 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna. He was the second of seven children. By the time he was three years old, he had slept next to a dying…
- Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own country for decades. He had been an Old Bolshevik, a trained naval engineer, a man who…
- Pavel FlorenskyPavel Alexandrovich Florensky was shot dead on the night of the 8th of December 1937, in a wood not far from Leningrad, transported there in a special train alongside some 500 other prisoners. The site of his burial remains unknown. He was…