Read Iain Finlayson's review for the Times

‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’’
T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland

1. Empedocles – jumping into a volcano

Legend says that Empedocles, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, killed himself by secretly jumping into Mt. Etna in Sicily; his idea was that the volcano would destroy his corpse and people would think he had been transformed into an immortal god and had been raised to the heavens. This ruse was uncovered, however, when Etna, not agreeing with Empedocles' plans, threw up his golden sandal.

2. Thomas Chatterton – poison

"The marvellous boy," as Wordsworth called him, committed suicide at seventeen, defeated in his battle against an uncaring, philistine London, which he had hoped to conquer after leaving his provincial, mercantile Bristol. Ignored or rejected by those who should have recognised his gift, Chatterton was left to starve in the archetypal garret, too proud to beg or even to accept help when it was offered. He struggled valiantly and defiantly, writing his poems, articles, and stories, sending them to editors, only for them to become lost in the wash of hackwork flooding Grub Street, or worse, printed without payment. Finally, his fate became unbearable and he decided to end it all, tearing his last poetry to bits in his death throes, succumbing to the arsenic he took that dreadful night of 23 August 1770 in Brooke Street, Holborn. There is a chance, however, that his death was really a result of an accidental arsenic overdose, which he took in order to cure a case of syphilis.

3. Heinrich von Kleist - gunshot

On 21 November 1811, on a grassy knoll overlooking the Lake Wannsee just outside Berlin, the playwright and novelist Heinrich von Kleist put a bullet through the heart of his companion Henriette Vogel, a 31-year-old woman with incurable cancer, and then placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fired.

4. Gerard de Nerval – hanging

A student of the occult, he was also famous for walking a lobster through the Palais-Royal in Paris. After two stays in an insane asylum and several bouts of madness, he finally hung himself with a filthy apron string he had carried for years and which he assured friends was really the Queen of Sheba’s garter.

5. Jack London – morphine overdose

Addicted to morphine and opium, London was a phenomenal drinker and was one of the first major writers to publicly confess to his alcoholism. In his passion for excess, it is easy to see a subliminal death-wish, a desire to pass beyond the limits of the self. London admitted to once almost drinking himself to death in a binge, and on another occasion, he stumbled into San Francisco Bay and “some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me.” London drifted for hours with the intention of letting himself drown, but sobered up in the end and was saved by a fisherman.

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