“Whom the gods love dies young,” wrote Menander in the late fourth century BC. “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising,” Cyril Connolly noted over two millennia later.

Gertrude Stein recalled that on the copy of her final exam for a class taught by William James she wrote, “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.” She then left the room. The next day a note arrived from Professor James that said, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself”—and then awarded her the highest mark in the course.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, once said of Lord Byron, “I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: BYRON IS DEAD!”

“I went sailing up to Great Point, which is fourteen miles. It was fine and rough so we went out in the open ocean and shipped water grandly. I have bought a large swordfish sword for the agassiz of an old salt by the name of Judas,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to his brother Marcelline in one of his earliest known letters, shortly after his eleventh birthday, in 1910.

Phia Rilke’s infant daughter had died a year before she gave birth to her son. She named him René Maria—sometimes referring to him as Fräulein, Margaret, and Sophie—and gave him dolls to play with, dressing him as a girl until he was six years old. The poet did not start using Rainer instead of René until he was in his twenties.