Where Are They Buried? (58 page)

Dogged by his flagging health, Robert and his family set sail for the South Pacific in 1888, and the following year he bought an estate in Samoa where he hoped to live happily ever after. The climate suited his respiration, the people were neighborly, and, more importantly, the island had a reasonably functional postal system. The Stevenson estate boasted a dozen Samoan servants who called Robert “Tusitala” (“the teller of tales”) and in his time there he pounded out an impressive number of works, though none rivaled the popularity of his earlier successes.

But Robert’s blissful experience on Samoa was short-lived. One evening while chatting with his wife, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. At 44, he was buried atop Mount Vaea on his own 300-acre Vailima estate in Apia, Samoa.

Robert’s grave marker is graced by his own words:

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

JULY 18, 1937 – FEBRUARY 20, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson’s atypical writing career began when he contributed to an Air Force newspaper, a service he had entered as part of a parole agreement after a particularly wild youth, and one which he exited, by his own account, with “totally unclassifiable status.” Following the military stint he embarked on a career path that was rocky, to put it mildly; at
Time
magazine he was fired for spending his time typewriting entire F. Scott Fitzgerald works to better understand the author’s writing style; at the
Middletown Daily Record
in New York, he was let go after a violent altercation with the company’s candy machine; his tenure at a Brazilian media publication was terminated due to gross discrepancies on expense reports; and in 1961 he was canned from a treasured caretaking job at Big Sur Hot Springs after publishing a controversial piece about the area’s hard-drinking, pot-smoking subculture.

Hunter inevitably gravitated to the drug and hippie culture of San Francisco where he fell into living and partying with the notorious Hell’s Angels biker gang as a sort of hanger-on whom they tolerated. Their toleration turned to admiration once his 1965 magazine feature of their exploits hit the newsstands, but then devolved into contempt, as Hunter sought to further capitalize on their dead-end lifestyle by extrapolating the piece into a full-length book,
Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang
. Oblivious to their rising displeasure, Hunter remained in their midst as he struggled to script a climactic final scene for the book’s ending. Finally, tensions burst at a California roadhouse and his subjects demonstrated to him their idea for the last chapter by beating him within an inch of his life.

With the success of
Hell’s Angels
, Hunter and his wide-open writing style became highly sought after and, in 1970 he inadvertently upped the ante and ended up casting an entirely new genre—a mad journalistic style in which the correspondent himself plays a central role in the story. With his mind blown out on assorted recreational inebriants and the heat of a deadline for a piece about the Kentucky Derby bearing down, Hunter resorted to merely delivering torn-out pages from his notebook. “I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody,” he recalled. Instead, the piece drew raves and was labeled a breakthrough in
journalism, an experience the soon-to-be counterculture hero likened to “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.” Gonzo journalism was born and Hunter’s heyday arrived.

In the next decade he perfected his acerbic mix of nonfiction writing and inserted himself into countless rambling essays and a handful of books that savagely chronicled the underbelly of American life and politics. In raw and sprawling satires such as
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter portrayed himself as a snarling maverick narrator whose beat was “the death of the American Dream.” Extending the Dr. Gonzo image to his real life, it became apparent that there may not have been too much embellishment in his published exploits; perpetually wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap while a cigarette dangled from his lips, the independent outlaw showed up late, if at all, and defied norms and conventions via a claim to intimate familiarity with a variety of mind-altering chemicals, homemade explosives, and guns. “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone … but they’ve always worked for me,” he wrote.

By the 1980s fans and critics complained that he was merely regurgitating past glories without adding anything new and Hunter confirmed their protests by retreating to his Colorado compound. But for his weekly “Hey Rube” ESPN sports column, the increasingly grumpy and vitriolic writer either failed to complete assignments or flat-out rejected them in the first place for most of the rest of his life. Nonetheless,
Rolling Stone
magazine, which had been the medium-of-choice for most of his gonzo musings during the prime years, kept him on its masthead as Chief of the “National Affairs Desk” right up to the bitter end.

One fine day at his Woody Creek fortress, on the phone with his wife and with his son and daughter-in-law in the next room, Hunter blew his brains out while seated in front of a typewriter. His suicide note entitled “Football Season Is Over” read: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt.”

After his death, friends remembered that on several occasions Hunter had mentioned he’d like his ashes to be shot from a cannon. Per his wishes, a field gun the size of the Statue of Liberty was assembled on his property and, while Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” blared from oversized speakers and well-wishers clinked glasses of whiskey, Dr. Gonzo’s mortal remains were blasted over the Rocky Mountain peaks.

JANUARY 3, 1892 – SEPTEMBER 2, 1973

Upon his 1915 graduation from Exeter College, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien immediately took up a commission as a second lieutenant on the front lines of the raging Great War. In time, though, he was sent back to England to recover from a case of trench fever and he joined the English Dictionary staff (writing entries in the w’s) at Oxford University. Around this time, Tolkien’s enthusiasm for the myths and languages of northern Europe caught fire through his membership at a literature club, and the groundwork for his stories about Middle-earth was laid.

Tolkien conceived of a Middle-earth fantasy world as the setting for his visionary tales, and its creation occupied him for twenty years. The details of the realm were derived from Celtic and Germanic sources whose common traditions were reworked to reflect Tolkien’s belief in the importance and perfectibility of man. Though its most striking creatures are the elves and dwarves, goblins and dragons, and wizards and demons, the most important race in Middle-earth is men and, free to choose their own destinies, they run the gamut from goblin-like evil and depravity to elf-like purity and integrity.

Tolkien also composed stories for his own children and, about 1930, began one with the idle sentence, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” As the story evolved, it became clear to Tolkien that this adventure of one Bilbo Baggins took place in the same Middle-earth, though at a much later time. In 1937 this story,
The Hobbit
, was published as a children’s book to critical and popular acclaim.

Bolstered by his success, Tolkien immediately began work on his next book,
The Lord of the Rings
, a longer, intense, and more intricately themed adult version of
The Hobbit
and, after years of painstaking revision, it was published in 1954. The work secured him a standing as an unequaled writer of imaginative literature, and Tolkien spent the rest of his life polishing and refining his vision. Leaving the original stories relatively untouched, he embellished their context with genealogical tables, historical speculations, and theological explications, all designed to clarify the meaning of his creation.

At 81, Tolkien died of a chest infection and was buried at Wolvercote Cemetery in Wolvercote, England.

Wolvercote is a picturesque parish of Oxford, 40 miles northwest of London that overlooks the Thames River. The cemetery
is off of Five Mile Drive, and the Tolkien grave is fairly elaborate. The main headstone is flanked by two smaller headstones for Tolkien and his wife, Edith, and they are engraved with flower patterns based upon those found in a posthumous work,
The Silmarillion
.

AUGUST 28, 1828 – NOVEMBER 20, 1910

The Russian author Leo Tolstoy was of a noble family dating back to the fourteenth century. His father, Count Nikolay, had a passion for gambling and, though he exhausted the family wealth, he was able to recover by marrying an heiress of the Volkonsky fortune that included 800 serfs and a 4,000-acre estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where Leo was born.

As man of the house in his 20s, Leo contracted heavy gambling debts himself, and he lost the estate’s 42-room mansion to a man named Gorokhov, who dismantled the structure as payment. After losing the main house, the family moved into one of the mansion’s remaining wings, while Leo and his brother meandered to the southern Caucasus Mountains, volunteering for service in the Crimean War. Drawing material from his self-lacerating diary entries, he began to write during the long lulls between fighting, and by 1857 had published the trilogy
Childhood
,
Boyhood
, and
Youth
.

Leo once said, “The one thing that is necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.” An entry in his wife’s diary for October 1863 reads: “Story about 1812, he is very involved with it,” and indeed, Tolstoy was intent upon telling his truth through the historically accurate masterpiece
War and Peace
. Tolstoy was convinced that philosophical principles could only be understood in their concrete expression in history, and in his vast canvas of five families against the background of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Tolstoy espoused that all is predestined, that we cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will. In his attention to the social matrix and psychological truth of his characters, Tolstoy reached the apogee of world literature.

No sooner did Tolstoy complete one masterpiece than he started another, and in 1877 he finished
Anna Karenina
. In this work he juxtaposed the crises of family with the quest for love. Tolstoy considered
Anna Karenina
his magnum opus. He later renounced all his earlier works, confessing, “I wrote everything into
Anna Karenina
.”

The idolization that Tolstoy enjoyed during the 1880s caused him to see himself as a moral prophet, and the ethical quest that tormented him drove him to abandon all else in order to seek meaning. As Tolstoy took up cobbling and obsessed over Chinese philosophies, his family relations became increasingly strained, especially as he played with the idea of giving all his wealth to charity. But in 1884 he compromised with his wife Sonya and assigned her the estate and all copyrights. Still, he continued to write and especially noteworthy is his powerful 1886 story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” which affirmed his belief in the primacy of individual conscience over group-collective morality. But at various times throughout the remainder of his life, Tolstoy tried to live as a wandering ascetic, returning home only to leave again on extended pilgrimages. After a quarrel with Sonya, Tolstoy set out on his last pilgrimage in November 1910 and soon died of pneumonia at the remote railway junction of Astapovo.

At 82, he was returned and buried at the place of his birth, Yasnaya Polyana estate near Tula, Russia.

Years after his death Sonya remarked, “I lived with Leo for 48 years, but I never really learned what kind of man he was.”

Yasnaya Polyana is located in western Russia, about 120 miles directly south of Moscow. Though there is nothing grandiose on the property—no ostentatious architecture or fancy gardens—its tree-lined lanes and tranquil ponds offer a bright spot in the otherwise drab and run-down industrial region of Tula. Tolstoy’s peaceful grave is on a leafy overlook above a ravine.

NOVEMBER 30, 1835 – APRIL 21, 1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain, so hated school as a boy that he stopped attending at twelve and became an apprentice printer at
The Hannibal Journal
in Missouri. Immersed in the newspaper business, he was soon contributing short essays of frontier humor and jokes to the paper and, at eighteen, he left home to work as a journalist in Philadelphia and New York.

A few years later he jumped from the news business when an opportunity to work steamboats on the Mississippi River arose, and by 23, he was a licensed river pilot. From that experience came the pen name he’d later employ, which related to the distance between the steamboat’s bottom and the riverbed; when a depth
of two fathoms was detected, the leadsman sounded an alert: “By the maaaark, twain!”