Deaths
- January 3 - Joy Adamson, conservationist and author of Born Free (killed by a servant in northern Kenya)
- January 3 - G. S. Fraser, poet and critic
- January 11 - Barbara Pym, novelist
- March 25 - James Wright, poet
- April 15 - Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, novelist and dramatist
- June 7 - Henry Miller, writer
- July 1 - C. P. Snow, novelist
- July 9 - Vinicius de Moraes, poet and songwriter
- July 26 - Kenneth Tynan, influential theatre critic
- September 18 - Katherine Anne Porter, novelist and essayist
- November 9 - Patrick Campbell, journalist and wit
- November 22 - Mae West, actress and dramatist
- December 2 - Romain Gary, writer
- December 8 - John Lennon, musician, author
- December 12 - Ben Travers, dramatist
- December 31 - Marshall McLuhan (author)
- date unknown - Gareth Evans, philosopher
- date unknown - Caradog Prichard, Welsh-language poet and novelist
Read more about this topic: 1980 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes,
they waste their deaths on us.”
—C.D. Andrews (1913–1992)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)