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Reading List · Lives Cut ShortWriters Who Died Young, and the Books They Left
Some of the most widely read books in literature were written by people who did not live to 40. Keats wrote his odes at 23; Emily Brontë published one novel; Anne Frank never knew her diary would be read. Several of these books appeared only after their authors’ deaths. This list is about that work: what each writer made in the time they had, and where a reader can start.
Every writer here died before the age of 40, and each has at least one book in print in English. Age and cause of death are given briefly, as facts, not as part of a legend. The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from John Keats (1795) to John Kennedy Toole (1937).
Twelve writers who died young, and where to start with each
John Keats
1795–1821 · London, England
Keats wrote odes, sonnets and long narrative poems about beauty, mortality, love and the imagination. In 1819 he wrote the odes for which he is best known, including ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘To Autumn’. His long poem Endymion (1818) opens with the line ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’.
He died of tuberculosis in Rome in February 1821, aged 25. His last collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), was better received than his earlier books. His letters, first published in 1848, are now read alongside the poems.
Read Keats if you want poems about beauty and loss that reward reading aloud.
Start with Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). The last volume Keats saw published, with the three narrative poems of its title and shorter poems. Or Endymion (1818). Keats’s long early poem, which opens ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’.
All John Keats books →Georg Büchner
1813–1837 · Goddelau, Hesse, Germany
Büchner left only a handful of works, all written within a few years: Danton’s Death (1835), a play about the French Revolution; the unfinished novella Lenz, about the Sturm und Drang poet J. M. R. Lenz; the comedy Leonce and Lena (1836), which satirises the nobility; and the fragmentary drama Woyzeck.
He was also a political radical and a scientist: in 1834 he co-wrote the revolutionary pamphlet The Hessian Courier, and in 1836 he became a lecturer in anatomy in Zürich. He died of typhus there in February 1837, aged 23. Germany’s Georg Büchner Prize is named after him.
Read Büchner if you want to see how much a writer packed into a few years of work.
Start with Danton’s Death (1835). Büchner’s first play, about the French Revolution; available in English with Lenz and Woyzeck in Penguin Classics’ Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings, translated by John Reddick. Or Lenz (1835). An unfinished novella based on the life of the poet J. M. R. Lenz, written in 1835 and published after Büchner’s death.
Emily Brontë
1818–1848 · Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Emily Brontë wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights, published in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a body of poems, some of which appeared in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), the collection she shared with her sisters Charlotte and Anne.
She died at Haworth in December 1848, aged 30, after an illness that began with a cold around the time of her brother Branwell’s funeral; tuberculosis may have been involved. Wuthering Heights, set on the Yorkshire moors, follows the bond between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and what it does to two families.
Read Emily Brontë if you want a novel driven by obsession rather than romance.
Start with Wuthering Heights (1847). The story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and the two families caught up in their attachment, told by a housekeeper to a visiting tenant.
All Emily Brontë books →Anne Brontë
1820–1849 · Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Anne Brontë, the youngest of the sisters, published two novels under the name Acton Bell. Agnes Grey (1847) follows a governess working for wealthy families; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) follows Helen, who leaves her abusive husband to protect their son, and deals with spousal abuse and social injustice.
She died in Scarborough in May 1849, aged 29, most likely of tuberculosis, five months after Emily. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is often considered one of the first feminist novels, and is a good book for readers who know the Brontës only through Charlotte and Emily.
Read Anne Brontë if you want the Brontë sister who wrote most directly about marriage and power.
Start with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Having fled her husband, Helen arrives with her young son at a long-empty mansion under an assumed name, and the village starts to talk. Or Agnes Grey (1847). Agnes works as a governess for two wealthy families, the Bloomfields and then the Murrays.
All Anne Brontë books →Stephen Crane
1871–1900 · Newark, New Jersey, USA
Crane wrote about war, poverty and people under pressure. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), which he published at his own expense, is set in the slums of New York; The Red Badge of Courage (1895) follows a young soldier in the American Civil War. He also published poetry, beginning with The Black Riders (1895).
His story ‘The Open Boat’ (1897) is based on his own 30 hours adrift in a dinghy after the SS Commodore sank off Florida. He reported on the Greco-Turkish War and the Spanish–American War, and died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, in June 1900, aged 28.
Read Crane if you want short, vivid fiction about fear and survival.
Start with The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Henry Fleming, a young Union private, runs from his first battle in the American Civil War and has to live with his fear and shame. Or Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Crane’s first novel, about a young woman in New York’s Bowery who is abandoned by her lover and rejected by her family, published at his own expense.
Katherine Mansfield
1888–1923 · Wellington, New Zealand
Mansfield wrote short stories built on small moments: a party, a family moving house, a summer by the sea, a sudden recognition. ‘Prelude’ (1918) follows a New Zealand family moving house, and the collections Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) made her name.
She was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917 and died at Fontainebleau, France, in January 1923, aged 34. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, edited the posthumous collection The Doves’ Nest (1923). Her first book, In a German Pension, had appeared in 1911.
Read Mansfield if you want stories where a single afternoon carries a whole life.
Start with The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). The last collection published in her lifetime, including ‘At the Bay’ and the title story. Or Bliss and Other Stories (1920). Her first collection after In a German Pension, including the title story.
All Katherine Mansfield books →Raymond Radiguet
1903–1923 · Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, France
Radiguet wrote his first novel, Le Diable au corps (in English The Devil in the Flesh), in his late teens, and it was published in 1923. It tells, in a cool and unsentimental voice, the semi-autobiographical story of a teenage boy’s affair with a married woman while her husband fights in the First World War; it caused a scandal and became a bestseller.
Radiguet met Jean Cocteau in 1919, and Cocteau became his mentor and collaborator. He died of typhoid fever in Paris in December 1923, aged 20. His second novel, Le Bal du comte d’Orgel, also about adultery, was published in 1924 and has appeared in English as Count d’Orgel’s Ball.
Read Radiguet if you want a short, cool-headed novel written by a teenager.
Start with The Devil in the Flesh (1923). A teenage boy has an affair with a married woman whose husband is at the front; available in English from Pushkin Press. Or Count d’Orgel’s Ball (1924). Radiguet’s second and last novel, published after his death, again about adultery.
Yi Sang
1910–1937 · Seoul, Korea
Yi Sang, the pen name of Kim Haegyŏng, trained in architecture and worked as a government architecture official before becoming known for experimental poetry and fiction. His poem series ‘Crow’s Eye View’ ran in a Seoul newspaper in 1934 until reader complaints stopped it after 15 of a planned 30 poems. His story ‘The Wings’ appeared in 1936.
He died of tuberculosis in Tokyo in April 1937, aged 26. The Yi Sang Literary Award, one of Korea’s literary prizes, has carried his name since 1977. In English, Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), translated by Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney and Sawako Nakayasu, collects his writing.
Read Yi Sang if you want experimental modernist writing from outside the European canon.
Start with Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020). An English selection of his poems, stories and essays, translated by Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney and Sawako Nakayasu.
Anne Frank
1929–1945 · Frankfurt, Germany
Anne Frank kept a diary while hiding with her family and others in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, from July 1942 until their arrest on 4 August 1944. She wrote about life in the hidden rooms, her family, her wish to become a writer and growing up under occupation.
She died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945, aged 15, most likely of typhus. Her diary was published in Dutch as Het Achterhuis in 1947 and in English as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. A 1986 forensic study confirmed its authenticity.
Read Anne Frank if you want the Second World War seen through one young writer’s eyes.
Start with The Diary of a Young Girl (1947). Anne Frank’s diary of two years in hiding in Amsterdam, first published in Dutch in 1947 and in English in 1952.
All Anne Frank books →Lorraine Hansberry
1930–1965 · Chicago, Illinois, USA
Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in March 1959, the first play by an African-American woman produced there. It follows the Younger family in a cramped South Side Chicago apartment as they argue over how to use a $10,000 insurance cheque, and takes its title from Langston Hughes’s poem ‘Harlem’.
The play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, making Hansberry, at 29, its youngest winner and the first Black American dramatist to receive it. She died of pancreatic cancer in New York in January 1965, aged 34; The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window closed on Broadway the night she died.
Read Hansberry if you want a play about family, money and ambition that still feels current.
Start with A Raisin in the Sun (1959). A Black family in Chicago argue over how to spend a life-insurance payment after the father’s death. Or To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969). A portrait drawn from Hansberry’s own writings, adapted by Robert Nemiroff after her death.
Sylvia Plath
1932–1963 · Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Plath wrote intense, tightly controlled poems about family, motherhood, the body, anger and identity. Her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, appeared in 1960; Ariel, published after her death in 1965, contains many of her best-known poems. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, appeared in 1963 under the name Victoria Lucas.
Plath died by suicide in London in February 1963, aged 30. Her Collected Poems (1981) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, the prize awarded posthumously. The Bell Jar follows Esther Greenwood, a college student on a summer internship at a New York magazine, through a period of severe depression.
Read Plath if you want poems of great precision and force.
Start with Ariel (1965). The collection of late poems published two years after her death. Or The Bell Jar (1963). Plath’s only novel, about a 19-year-old student’s summer internship in New York and the depression that follows.
All Sylvia Plath books →John Kennedy Toole
1937–1969 · New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Toole is known for one comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans and following Ignatius J. Reilly, who has not worked in years and has to take a job after his mother runs up a debt. He also wrote The Neon Bible in 1954, at 16, during his last year of high school.
Toole died by suicide in 1969, aged 31, with neither novel published. His mother, Thelma Toole, sent the manuscript to publishers for years and in 1976 persuaded the novelist Walker Percy to read it. It was published in 1980 with Percy’s foreword and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
Read Toole if you want a comic novel with one of fiction’s strangest heroes.
Start with A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). A comic novel set in early-1960s New Orleans, in which Ignatius J. Reilly, who lives with his mother, has to find work to help pay for her car accident. Or The Neon Bible (1989). The novel Toole wrote at 16, published twenty years after his death.
All John Kennedy Toole books →Which of these writers should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For poems about beauty and mortality — John Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
- For a novel of obsession — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
- For an early feminist novel — Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
- For a first-hand account of the war years — Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)
- For a landmark of American theatre — Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
- For a comic novel — John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Which famous writers died young?
Among the best known are John Keats (25), Emily Brontë (30), Anne Brontë (29), Katherine Mansfield (34), Sylvia Plath (30) and Anne Frank (15). This list includes twelve writers who died before the age of 40.
How old was John Keats when he died?
Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged 25. His best-known odes date from 1819.
Why is Franz Kafka not on this list?
Kafka died in June 1924 at the age of 40, a month before his 41st birthday, so he falls just outside the under-40 cut-off used here.
Which books on this list were published after the author died?
A Confederacy of Dunces, Plath’s Ariel, Anne Frank’s diary, Radiguet’s Le Bal du comte d’Orgel and Büchner’s Woyzeck all appeared after their authors’ deaths.
Who is the youngest writer on the list?
Anne Frank, who died in Bergen-Belsen at 15. Raymond Radiguet, who died at 20, is the youngest novelist on the list.
Which book is the best place to start?
For a short read, try Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh or Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. For a longer novel, Wuthering Heights or A Confederacy of Dunces.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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