5 authors who died tragic and mysterious deaths

Literature is full of mysterious and untimely deaths with sleuths somehow getting to the bottom and lifting the secret around them. However, what if we tell you that there are many tragic and mysterious deaths of real-life authors that are equally shocking? Yes, you read it right! Here's a look at five authors who died tragic and mysterious deaths.

In June 1849, Poe embarked on a speaking tour to raise funds for a literary magazine he hoped to publish. On September 27, 1849, he was supposed to board a ferry from Richmond, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland, and then on to New York. The night before the ferry trip he visited a doctor in Richmond for a fever. About the next few days, very little is known for certain. Poe arrived in Baltimore on September 28, but he didn’t go on to New York. He turned up in a tavern in Baltimore on October 3. He was in bad shape, nearly unresponsive in what onlookers assumed was an alcoholic stupor. A note was sent to a local doctor, and Poe was soon admitted to a hospital. One odd detail is that the clothes Poe had on did not appear to be his own. Instead of his usual black wool suit, he was wearing a cheap ill-fitting suit and a straw hat. In the hospital, Poe continued to drift in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and speaking nonsense when he was awake. On October 7 he died. A Baltimore newspaper reported enigmatically that the cause had been "congestion of the brain".

The playwright and novelist died a broken man. Penniless and disgraced by his conviction for homosexuality and subsequent imprisonment, he had fled to Paris upon his release. There he died from meningitis in a seedy apartment. Opinions vary about the cause of his condition, His physicians reported that it was an ear infection sustained while in prison. A 1988 biography by Richard Ellmann however claimed it was connected to syphilis which Wilde himself said he had contracted from a prostitute while a student at Oxford. However, Wilde’s family, through his grandson Merlin Holland, have naturally disputed this claim.

On July 8th, 1822 the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Bay of Lerici off the northwest coast of Italy when his small boat overturned in a squall. He was 29. However, some suspect that Shelley’s death was not accidental: that he either died by suicide or that his boat was attacked by pirates.

In 1960 a mysterious car crash killed Albert Camus and his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was behind the wheel. However, research suggests that the 46-year-old French Algerian Nobel laureate was the victim of premeditated murder: he was silenced by the KGB - the main security agency for the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians had a motive: Camus had campaigned tirelessly against the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and vociferously supported the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the dissident novelist Boris Pasternak, which enraged Moscow.

On the night of 24 February 1852, Gogol burned some of his manuscripts, which contained most of the second part of 'Dead Souls'. He explained this as a mistake, a practical joke played on him by the Devil. Soon thereafter, he took to bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later.