Patrick Dennis, Madcap “Uncle Mame,” Dead at 55 of Pancreatic Cancer

The real life of Patrick Dennis was just as bizarre as the madcap adventures of his most famous invention, Auntie Mame. Profiled in Life magazine as one of the world’s most successful authors at age forty, he tried to commit suicide a week later and was committed to a mental institution for eight months.  A multi-millionaire, thanks to his best-selling novel Auntie Mame and fifteen others, he was penniless at age fifty and went to work as a butler for Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s hamburger mogul, who had no idea who he was.  A devoted husband to Louise Stickney and father of their two children, he fell in love with a man and abandoned his family.

Dennis was born Edward Everett Tanner III on May 18, 1921, in Chicago. Nicknamed “Pat” before he was born, in honor of the Irish boxer Pat Sweeney, known as a “dirty fighter,” he attended Evanston Township High School.  He joined the American Field Service and drove an ambulance in Northern Africa and the Middle East during World War II.

After the war, using the pen name Patrick Dennis, he wrote the novel Auntie Mame, about a character based on his father’s sister. Writing in the first person, he inserted himself into the fictional narrative as the orphaned youngster who is raised by a zany aunt. It sold two million copies and was on the best-seller list for more than two years. Adapted into a play, a movie, a musical, and a movie musical, it was a vehicle for Rosalind Russell, Beatrice Lillie, Angela Lansbury, and, unfortunately, Lucille Ball. Dennis wrote fifteen other books, some as Virginia Rowans, and several became best-sellers. He was also the author of Little Me, a parody memoir which became a hit Broadway musical starring Sid Caesar playing seven roles.

Having squandered a fortune, Dennis took a job during the 1970s as a butler, work which he said he greatly enjoyed.  He also became well known as an outré denizen of the Greenwich Village gay scene. 

In 1976 Dennis was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and by the autumn of that year was gravely ill.  He asked his physician, Dr. William G. Cahan, for enough sleeping pills to end it all.  “I can’t use a gun,” said Dennis, “because I can’t shoot straight, and I can’t jump out of a window because I’m afraid of heights.” Dr. Cahan naturally declined to offer a suicidal dose, but did prescribe a modest supply of morphine-based pain-killers, which Dennis squirreled away.

Dennis maintained his dry wit to the very end.  On his last day, November 6, 1976, his friend and former housekeeper, Corry Salley, administered some medicine to him and asked, “Is there anything else I can do?”  Dennis replied, “Yes, for God’s sake, will you put in your dentures.” His estranged wife, Louise, was at his bedside, and his last words were to her: “Louise, there’s a spot on your dress.” At fifty-five, “Uncle Mame,” as one biographer called him, the man who led a life as improbable as a character in one of his books, was dead. Whether death was hastened by ingesting some of the pills he had stowed remains unknown.

In his will, Dennis specified that there be no funeral or memorial service. “My body is to be cremated and disposed of in the quickest, cheapest manner possible (flushed down the toilet, scattered to the winds, sunk into an unmarked hole in the ground, etc.).”  Louise kept the urn containing his ashes and was buried with it cradled in her arms 24 years later.

Syphilitic Stroke Fells Symbolist Poet Charles Baudelaire at 46

Charles Baudelaire was a mama’s boy and a decadent ne’er-do-well, who wrote a group of poems known as The Flowers of Evil that profoundly influenced generations of future poets--even though many of the poems were denounced as obscene and six of them were banned in France until 1949. Poor Baudelaire also had gonorrhea and syphilis (acquired in the usual disreputable manner) and a fondness for opium, laudanum, and cognac, which conspired to snuff out his life at the age of forty-six.

Born in Paris April 9, 1821, Baudelaire was always close to his mother, a relationship that deepened after his father died when Charles was six. But the following year, she remarried a French diplomat and military officer named Jacques Aupick, whom Charles regarded as a rival for his mother’s affection. In a letter written to her years later he spoke of his “passionate love” for her as a child. After his stepfather’s death, when Charles was thirty-six, he wrote to his mother: “I believe that I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong only to you.”

Young Charles was sent to boarding school in Lyon and then studied law at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he spent much of his time running up  expenses for dandified clothes, liquor, and prostitutes.  Throughout his life Baudelaire wheedled money out of his mother to cover his debts. In desperation his stepfather shipped him out as a crewman on a freighter to India, but he jumped ship and returned to Paris, where, lo and behold!, having reached the age of twenty-one, he inherited a small fortune of 99,568 francs from his late father’s estate. That would probably be something in excess of half a million dollars in today’s buying power, and it enabled Baudelaire to live a playboy’s life—until he had spent almost half the inheritance and his parents managed to put the remainder in trust, granting him only a small monthly allowance. 

During this period, Baudelaire became involved with Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born sometime actress and the inspiration for a series of “Black Venus” poems. Baudelaire’s family vehemently rejected his relationship with her, whether because of her ethnicity or her profession is not clear. Jeanne and Charles remained off-and-on lovers for the rest of his life, although he also engaged in dalliances with a voluptuous blonde actress named Marie Daubrun and a demimondaine named Apolonie Sabatier, who conducted a salon that attracted the likes of Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and Ernest Feydeau.

In 1857 Baudelaire published his chief (and practically his only) poetic work, Les Fleurs du Mal, which launched the French symbolist movement in poetry, deeply affecting such followers as Paul Verlaine, Artur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and many later poets. Baudelaire’s poems deal with taboo subjects like death and sexual activity of many varieties, which he treated in sensual detail. Six poems deal with lesbian love, and he and his publisher were tried and convicted of an offense against public morals, barely escaping prison time. The six poems were were banned from publication in France, a prohibition not lifted until 1949.

Always strapped for cash, Baudelaire saw his financial position worsen when his publisher went bankrupt in 1861. Belgium offered the prospect of income from lectures and the sale of his books, so Baudelaire moved there in 1863.  But his lifelong indulgence in drugs and alcohol, combined with the continuing symptoms of venereal diseases, resulted in his collapse in the Church of Saint-Loup in Namur in 1866. This was followed by a series of strokes in which he suffered loss of speech and partial paralysis. He returned to Paris and entered a nursing home, where, after a year’s confinement, he died on August 31, 1867, at the age of forty-six. He was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

During his final days, Baudelaire was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but whether he was actually a religious believer is a subject of great speculation.  Certainly his poems are filled with Christian symbolism, but there are also references to Satanism. There is a famous story of  Baudelaire’s close friend, the one-named photographer Nadar, a free thinker who often visited Baudelaire in the nursing home.  One day Nadar asked Baudelaire, “How can you possibly believe in God and an afterlife?” Unable to speak, Baudelaire smiled and gestured toward a glorious sunset over the Arc de Triomphe. Most likely Baudelaire remained an unwilling agnostic until the end of his life, for as he wrote in a letter to his mother in 1861: “I desire with all my heart—and with a sincerity which no one except myself will ever understand—to believe that an external invisible being is interested in my fate; but what must one do to believe it?”

In a “mattress-grave,” poet Heinrich Heine died at 58 of mysterious paralysis

Heinrich Heine, German poet, journalist, and critic, was born in Düsseldorf, December 13, 1797, to Jewish parents, attended Catholic schools, and converted to Protestantism when he was twenty-seven because of regulations preventing Jews from working in the German civil service. 

Known for his lyric poetry that is remembered today in lieder by Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert, Heine is widely credited as predicting the evils of Naziism with a line from his 1821 play Almansor, “They that begin by burning books will end by burning people.” Indeed, his works were banned by the Nazi Third Reich as “degenerate.” Heine spent the last eight years of his life in what he called his “mattress-grave,” with a mysterious crippling paralysis.

After schooling he attended the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin, finally earning a law degree. He never practiced law, or worked in the civil service, but instead followed a literary path in poetry and playwriting, largely supported, somewhat grudgingly, by his wealthy banker uncle, Salomon Heine. He finally wound up in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life and produced the balance of his works, most notable of which are his early Book of Songs and the later Romanzero and Poems of 1853 and 1854. 

He had affairs with numerous women, in the course of which he acquired syphilis, which may have contributed to his later paralysis. When he was thirty-eight, He met an illiterate Parisian shopgirl named Crescence Eugénie Mirat, whom he preferred to call Mathilde. They began an affair, and two years later she moved in with him. Five years after that they were married, although that didn’t prevent his starting a torrid romance with a young German-born French writer named Camille Selden, which lasted until his death.

Constantly in poor health, with venereal diseases, chronic lead poisoning, and painful hemorrhoids, he eased his pain  with opium. In May of 1848 Heine suddenly fell paralyzed—perhaps the result of syphilis or untreated multiple sclerosis—and took to his bed, where he spent his last eight years, unable to move, suffering from spinal cramps, and partially blind. During this period he continued to work and returned to the Christian faith that he had earlier abandoned. In one of his lyric poems, he seems to look upon death as a welcome relief:

            Our death is in the cool of night,
            Our life is in the pool of day.
            The darkness glows. I’m drowning,
            The day has tired me with light.

            Over my head in leaves grown deep,
            The young nightingale sings.
            It sings only of love,
            I hear it in my sleep.

 

Heine died on February 17, 1856, at the age of fifty-eight. He is buried in Paris’ Montmartre Cemetery.

Poet Wallace Stevens, 75, dead of stomach cancer after deathbed conversion

According to one of his business colleagues at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, the poetry Wallace Stevens wrote was a “bunch of gobbledygook.” According to critic Harold Bloom, Stevens was the “best and most representative” American poet of his time, who enjoyed an artistic flowering in his later years unrivaled since Sophocles. Whichever assessment is true, Stevens led a paradoxical life—a strait-laced insurance lawyer, with a poetic streak, during business hours, and an angst-ridden, hard-drinking, occasional brawler after work.

Born October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second of five children, his uneventful childhood was punctuated by an attack of malaria that forced him to repeat the ninth grade. He went to Harvard, where he edited the literary magazine.  After moving to New York, worked as a newspaperman, frequented Greenwich Village artistic circles, published a few poems in literary magazines, and then went to law school. He took a job with an insurance company and in 1916 moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he spent the rest of his life.

Stevens married a Reading girl, Elsie Viola Katchel, who was, in his parents’ view, from the wrong side of the tracks. They did not attend the wedding, and Stevens never spoke to his father for the rest of his life. The marriage was difficult. Elsie was described by those who knew her as “a mousy little creature,” “unbalanced,” “not very helpful to Wallace,” “off the beam,” and a “witch.” For his part, Stevens was said to have “treated her like ash.” After the birth of their daughter, Holly, the couple moved to separate bedrooms and rarely saw or spoke to each other.

Elsie deplored alcoholic beverages, and Stevens, in the view of one of his employees, “liked a good drink-up.” Most of his carousing, accompanied by plenty of martinis or whiskey, was done on business trips to New York or solo vacations to Key West, Florida, where he liked to hang out—and sometimes exchange words or blows—with Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost. On several occasions he got into fierce arguments with Frost, who accused him of being drunk and “acting inappropriately.” Stevens once challenged Hemingway to a fistfight, and wound up with a broken hand, a broken nose, and two black eyes.

Stevens turned out lean, surreal, Modernist verses with an idiosyncratic vocabulary, often writing them surreptitiously between reviewing contracts at his insurance office. His poetic output included such landmarks as “Harmonium,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” They earned him a place of honor among Modernist poets, including his friends William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. The Pulitzer Prize, for his Collected Works, came in 1955, shortly before his death.

Stevens once referred to himself as a “dried-up Presbyterian,” but he maintained a lifelong interest in Roman Catholicism. On his many trips to New York, he would often stop at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for a couple of hours of meditation.  He maintained correspondence with a nun named Sister Madeleva, the president of St. Mary’s College and also a poet, who urged him to “join the fold.” Stevens’ deathbed conversion, attested by the hospital chaplain, has been disputed by his daughter, Holly.

On March 28, 1955, Stevens went to see his family physician, Dr. James Moher, about stomach pains he had been having. Moher odered barium X-rays, which failed to disclose any disease.  On April 19, still suffering, Stevens underwent more thorough X-rays, which showed diverticulitis, a gallstone, and a bloated stomach. He was operated on April 26, at Hartford’s St. Francis Hospital, by Dr. Benedict Landry, who discovered Stevens was suffering from stomach cancer. He returned home on May 11 to recuperate, but Elsie, who had had a stroke earlier that year, found herself unable to tend to him, and he was sent to Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20.

In early June Stevens was feeling well enough to attend commencement ceremonies at the University of Hartford, where he was given an honorary degree, and on June 13, he went to New Haven to receive another degree from Yale. After that he returned to his job at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity, but on July 21, he suffered a relapse and went back into the hospital.

During this final stay, he developed a friendshsip with the Catholic chaplain, the Rev. Arthur Hanley, with whom he had daily conversations. “I think I’d better get in the fold now,” Stevens told him. Father Hanley gave this account of Stevens’ conversion in a 1977 letter to Professor Janet McCann, a poet and professor at Texas A&M University:

            “The first time he came to the hospital, he expressed a certain emptiness in his life…We sat and talked a long time. During his visit this time, I saw him 9 or 10 times…At least 3 times, he talked about getting into the fold—meaning the Catholic Church. The doctrine of hell was an objection which we later got thru… alright.  He often remarked about the peace and tranquility that he experienced in going into a Catholic Church and spending some time.  He spoke about St. Patrick's Cathedral in N.Y. I can't give you the date of his baptism. I think it might be recorded at the hospital. He said he had never been baptized. He was baptized absolutely. Wallace and his wife had not been on speaking terms for several years. So we thought it better not to tell her. She might cause a scene in the hospital…He said if he got well, we would talk a lot more and if not—he would see me in heaven.…”

On August 1 Stevens lapsed into a coma and died the next day at 8:30 a.m. at the age of seventy-five. He is buried in Hartford’s Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Liver Cancer Claimed Jean Racine, 59, Torn Between Debauchery and Piety

Throughout his life, playwright Jean Racine was torn between the rigorous strictures of the strait-laced and deeply pious Jansenists and the louche bacchanalian high life of a Parisian theatre world laced with wine and sex. He stuck with Bacchus long enough to become a theatrical giant.

           

Racine was born December 20, 1639, in La Ferté-Milon, a small town fifty miles north of Paris.  Both his parents died when he was an infant, and he was placed in the care of his grandmother, Marie Desmoulins, who sent him to a monastery at Port-Royal des Champs, run by monks who adhered to Jansenism, a strict Catholic sect that was accused of heresy for its denial of free will and Calvinistic insistence on the depravity of mankind. Despite the severity of the discipline, young Jean had the opportunity of studying the rich literature of Latin and Greek classics. When he was eighteen, the monks sent him to Paris to study law at the College of Harcourt, a decision they no doubt came to regret after Racine fell in with a theatrical crowd and decided to try his luck at his first love—the theatre, even though that profession was castigated by the Jansenists as the work of the devil.

With high hopes, Racine submitted his first play, a tragedy, La Thébaïde, to Molière’s company, and he was elated when it was accepted for production at the Palais-Royal. A second work, Alexandre le Grand, was produced the following year, and Racine was on his way to a career in the glittering beau monde of Paris under King Louix XIV. 

Molière’s forte was comedy, and Racine was not happy with the quality of the production his tragedies were receiving, and he decided to switch his allegiance to a rival company, the Hôtel de Bourgogne.  He also decided to take Molière’s leading lady, Thérèse du Parc, with him to the new theatre—after first seducing her. Molière, having given young Racine his first big break, was deeply hurt by his betrayal and never spoke to his protégé again.

Meanwhile, Racine continued to have great success at the Bourgogne playhouse with his tragedies, mostly based on Greek myths, including Iphigénie, Britannicus, Bérénice, Bajazet, Mithridate, and his masterpiece, Phaedre. The dashing young playwright, his ascetic Jansenist days banished from his mind, also had great success as a Lothario, with a string of affairs with actresses and courtesans, including one leading lady whom he was accused of murdering by poison—although he escaped formal charges.

Racine also managed to acquire a host of enemies, many of whom were loyal fans of the older playwright, Pierre Corneille, and they felt that Racine had failed to show him proper respect. So determined were his foes to destroy Racine’s career that they bought a block of seats in the front rows for the opening of Phaedre—then failed to show up, leaving a huge swath of empty seats and casting a pall on the performance. 

Whether this animosity, or a romantic failure—or some deep religious epiphany—motivated Racine, in 1677 he decided to leave the theatre and return to his Jansenist roots. Back at Port-Royal, the monks arranged a marriage for him with Catherine de Romanet, a pious young woman with whom he had seven children. Catherine never saw any of his plays or read a single line of them.  Racine also took up a new job as royal historiographer, a sinecure that had been secured for him by Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s consort.

In the spring of 1699, when he was fifty-nine, Racine fell ill.  He languished for a few weeks in Paris, where he sought treatment, and on April 21, he died there of liver cancer.  He requested burial in Port-Royal at the foot of his Jansenist teacher’s grave, but as a special honor he was placed at its head.  The monks’ eulogy omitted any mention of his theatrical work:

                  On this day, one thousand six hundred and 

     ninety-nine, there died in Paris Jean Racine, treasurer of 

     France, secretary of the King and Gentleman-in-Ordinary 

     of his Bedchamber. He had been brought up in              

     these precincts with other persons who were pursuing 

     their studies here, and having been obliged to depart 

     hence, he followed for some time the ways of the world. 

     But God showed him His grace by renewing in his spirit  

     the light of truth which had been darkened there and by 

     awakening in his heart the sentiments of piety. He had 

     much affection for this monastery; and he has given us 

     proof of his zeal, having used his influence to protect us. 

     His body has been brought here and buried in the 

     outside cemetery as he had directed. He left us eight 

     hundred livres in his will.

In 1710, when Louis XIV had Port-Royal razed, Racine’s body was moved to the Church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 44, creator of ‘Little Prince’, dead in wartime plane crash

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose famous “Little Prince” was created to combat the popularity of “Mary Poppins,” died as he had lived most of his life—soaring in an aircraft high above the earth. Saint-Exupéry’s love of flying was matched by his love of literature, and he once exasperated ground crews by circling over an airfield for an hour before landing so that he could finish reading a novel (the title of which is not recorded).

Born June 29, 1900, in Lyon to an aristocratic Catholic family, he inherited the title of count, but no fortune to go with it, after his father le Comte Jean de Saint Exupéry, dropped dead in a train station when Antoine was only three years old. (Saint-Exupéry later added the hyphen to his name to prevent Americans from calling him “Mr. Exupéry.”)  He failed out of the French Naval Academy twice, studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, served in the French cavalry, where he took flying lessons, transferred to the air force, and finally snared a job as an airmail pilot. 

His experiences flying mail routes across desolate stretches in Africa and South America, and over the South Atlantic, including serious injuries in several near-fatal crashes, provided material for two of his most famous books, Night Flight, a novel, and Wind, Sand, and Stars, a memoir that won the U. S. National Book Award and established him in a lucrative writing career. In between flying assignments, Saint-Exupéry held down jobs as a test pilot, a publicity attaché for Air France, and a reporter for Paris-Soir, while pursuing his literary career.  

In 1931 Saint-Exupéry married Consuelo Suncin, a twice-widowed Salvadoran writer and artist, who had the artistic soul of a bohemian and the vicious tongue of a viper. She was both his muse and his nemesis, and their on-again, off-again marriage was marked by many affairs, notably Saint-Exupéry’s with a Frenchwoman named Hélène de Vogüé, who became his biographer and literary executor. The Saint-Exupérys moved to New York in 1941 after France fell to the Germans, and spread their time among dual penthouses on Central Park South, a townhouse in Beekman Place, and a summer home on Long Island. It is rumored that Saint-Exupéry and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, were lovers during this time. 

The wife of Saint-Exupéry’s publisher persuaded him to write a children’s book, in order to capitalize on the popularity of P. L. Travers’ tales of a nanny, Mary Poppins, and the result was The Little Prince, ostensibly for children but really a fable for adults. Drawing on his aviation experiences, it tells the story of a pilot in the desert who encounters a little boy, a prince fallen to earth from an asteroid. The central message of the story, expressed by a fox the prince meets, is, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.” The book has sold almost 150 million copies worldwide.

During the height of World War II, in 1943, Saint-Exupéry returned to France and resumed flying with his former squadron in the Mediterranean theatre. Still suffering from injuries that prevented him from dressing himself in his flight suit or turning his head in flight to check on enemy aircraft, he became depressed and began drinking heavily. He wrote a pessimistic work, Citadelle, in which he expressed the view that man’s only reason for living was to be a repository for civilized values. 

Despite his disabilities, and although at forty-three eight years over the maximum age for combat pilots, Saint-Exupéry gained permission from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to fly reconnaissance missions. On July 31, 1944, he took off from an airfield in Corsica in an unarmed P-38 to gather information about troop movements in France. He never returned. Sixty years later, wreckage raised from the seabed near Marseille was identified as belonging to his plane. The forty-four-year-old pilot had probably been shot down by an enemy fighter, though the cause of the crash may never be known.  After the war, at least three Luftwaffe pilots claimed to have shot him down, but none of their stories has been backed by solid evidence.

Flute-playing poet, composer, and lecturer Sidney Lanier dead of tuberculosis at 39

 Poor Sidney Lanier, for whom a middle school in Houston has been named since 1926, recently suffered the indignity of having his name removed from the school, owing to his participation in the Civil War on the Confederate side.  The sad irony, of course, is that Lanier is hardly known for his military service and was honored, not for that, but for his later achievements as a poet, musician, and faculty member of Johns Hopkins University.

Born in Macon, Georgia, on February 3, 1842, to descendants of French Huguenots, Lanier studied the flute as a child and then attended Oglethorpe University, graduating at age seventeen as class valedictorian. When the Civil War broke out, he volunteered and served mostly as a pilot and signal officer aboard British blockade-runners, smuggling supplies past Union ships.  He was captured by Union forces and imprisoned for five months at Point Lookout in Maryland, where he became infected with tuberculosis, which plagued him for the rest of his brief life. At war's end, he had to walk all the way home to Macon, arriving desperately ill.

He taught school in Macon and then went to work as a desk clerk at the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, Alabama.   Adept at not only the flute, but also the banjo, violin, guitar, piano, and organ, he entertained hotel guests with his music, and served as organist at the First Presbyterian church. He also wrote his only novel, Tiger-Lilies, an anti-war autobiographical work published in 1867.  The same year he moved to Prattville, Alabama, became a school principal, and married a friend from Macon, Mary Day, with whom he had four sons.

Returning to Macon, he took up the practice of law, as his health worsened from constant attacks of tuberculosis. He began to publish poetry, much of which sold well and established him as a literary figure. Most notable of his verses were "Corn" (1875), "The Symphony" (1875), "Centennial Meditation" (1876), "The Song of the Chattahoochee" (1877), "The Marshes of Glynn" (1878), and "Sunrise" (1881).

Seeking a better climate for his lungs, he left his family and went to Texas, where he spent time in Houston, Galveston, Austin, and San Antonio, working as a freelance musician. He left Texas in 1873 and sought permanent work in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, winding up as a member of the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore, where he soon rose to first flautist.  Lanier composed several notable works for orchestra, including “Black Birds,” a work that mimics the bird’s song on the flute.   

Lanier's family rejoined him in Baltimore, and he supported them with his work as a musician and as a poet. In the late 1870s he began to lecture on literature at Johns Hopkins University, where he was named a permanent faculty member, specializing in Shakespeare, Chaucer, English novelists, and Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Lanier maintained a lifelong Christian belief, reflected in much of his poetry, which stemmed from his college days, when he was under the influence of James Woodrow, a professor of science, who regarded science as a gift of God.  Woodrow taught the theory of evolution, for which he was condemned by the Southern Presbyterian Church, but held to his Christian faith—as did his pupil, Sidney Lanier.  In later life Lanier was unaffiliated with any denomination, but remained a devout Christian and independent thinker.

Continually suffering from tuberculosis, Lanier sought relief in North Carolina. Convalescing with his family in the small town of Lynn, he suffered complications and died on September 7, 1881. He was thirty-nine. Lanier is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.