Welcome to Litsy!

�Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.� �William Saroyan, Pulitzer Prize�winning author Famous authors, like everybody else, know that one day they will die. Final Chapters tells the fascinating stories of more than one hundred writers� encounters with death�and their attitudes toward the Grim Reaper: fear, uncertainty, or acceptance. Francis Bacon wrote, �It is as natural to die as to be born,� while Socrates told the judges who condemned him, �And now we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which is better is known to God alone.� Death often came in startling ways for these well-known writers. The playwright Aeschylus was conked by a turtle falling from the sky. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed in a barroom brawl. Moli�re collapsed while playing the role of a hypochondriac in one of his plays. Edgar Allan Poe was found semicomatose in someone else�s clothes shortly before he died. Sherwood Anderson was felled by a toothpick in a martini. Did Dylan Thomas really die of eighteen straight whiskeys? And was it a bottle cap or murder that did in Tennessee Williams? If these authors have lessons for us, the best may be that of Marcus Aurelius: �Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.�