Curated playlist
1976 deaths
- Benjamin BrittenAfter fire destroyed his concert hall in 1969, Benjamin Britten had it rebuilt within a year.
- Max ErnstMax Ernst wrote that he died in 1914 and was resurrected in 1918. He meant his years as a soldier.
- Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie vanished for 11 days in 1926, and a nationwide manhunt followed. She was found at a Harrogate hotel.
- Martin HeideggerPhilosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. He did so while admired as a leading thinker of being.
- Milton WaldmanMilton Waldman was an American author and publisher, and he is remembered chiefly for a book he did not publish. The book was not an ordinary one. J. R. R. Tolkien wanted a single publisher to take his vast legendarium and The Lord of the…
- Mao ZedongMao Zedong once worked as a library assistant in Peking. He later founded the People's Republic of China.
- Carlo GambinoCarlo Gambino spent more than fifty years in organized crime and was locked in a prison cell for less than two of them. In New York, his name now belongs to an entire Mafia family. The men around him were shot, jailed, forced into…
- Stith ThompsonA University of Wisconsin undergraduate once wrote a thesis called "The Return from the Dead in Popular Tales and Ballads." The student was Stith Thompson, an American folklorist. Admirers later described him as "America's most important…
- Bernard MontgomeryBernard Law Montgomery lay in an open field at Méteren on the 13th of October 1914, shot through the right lung by a sniper. The village sits near the Belgian border at Bailleul. Montgomery was a young officer of the Royal Warwickshire…
- Zhou EnlaiZhou Enlai ran Communist spies in Shanghai while the secret police hunted him. He never used public transportation.
- Werner HeisenbergA spy once carried a pistol to a Werner Heisenberg lecture, ready to shoot him. Moe Berg did not fire.
- Rudolf BultmannRudolf Bultmann told students it hardly mattered what Jesus did in his life.
- Anneliese MichelAnneliese Michel weighed just 30 kilograms when she died at home in Bavaria on the 1st of July 1976. In the year before her death, priests had performed 67 Catholic exorcism rites over her. She was 23 years old. Her parents had stopped…
- Raymond QueneauRaymond Queneau calculated that his book of sonnets would take 190,258,751 years to read nonstop.
- Trofim LysenkoTrofim Lysenko, a peasant who learned to read at 13, came to rule Soviet biology. He denied that genes exist.