Born May 13: Bruce Chatwin

The only contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to admit he was gay, he married a woman in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She was English; she didn't mind, though she did ask for a separation in 1980.) Many episodes in his travel books only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets, and his much loved first novel concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Yet even when he was dying at forty-eight in 1989, he remained so closeted he said he had a rare, fatal blood disease contracted in China from a bat bite, rather than say he had aids. One of his lovers was Jasper Conran; Chatwin died in the South of France in a house owned by Jasper's mother, Shirley Conran, and his ashes were scattered near Patrick Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese. If you've never read him, you must. Start with In Patagonia or The Songlines [aborigines in Australia], if you want travel, or On the Black Hill, if you want a wonderful Welsh novel.