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Died. Rene Lucien Belbenoit, 59, author of Dry Guillotine, a bestselling account of his experiences as a prisoner in France's penal-colony hellhole in French Guiana (with its infamous Devil's Island), and the source of much of the notoriety that forced France to close the penal colony in 1953; of heart disease; in Lucerne Valley, Calif. From the chateau of the Countess d'Entremeuse, Belbenoit stole a necklace in 1921, was shipped to French Guiana. He often tried to escape. On his second attempt, one of his fellow fugitives, a peg-legged man, was killed in a fight. The others ate his liver and good leg. On his successful fifth attempt (1935), the 90-lb. Belbenoit carried with him a 30-lb. oilskin package containing the notes that became Dry Guillotine. Eventually he was permitted to live in the U.S., settled in California's Mojave Desert as a storekeeper, became a U.S. citizen. At his death, he was completing a new book called An Anatomy of Justice.
Died. Maxwell Anderson, 70, playwright; following a stroke; in Stamford. Conn. When he was 33 and an editorial writer for the old New York World, he listened to a neighbor's wife reading a play written by her husband. "If that's a play, I can write one too," said Maxwell Anderson, and after that few seasons passed when one of his plays did not open on Broadway. In 1933 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Both Your Houses. In 1936 and 1937 he won Drama Critics' Awards for Winterset and High Tor, which did not shake his opinion that the critics were "the Jukes family of journalism." His first fame—and the flood of cash that enabled him to give up newspaper work—came in 1924 with What Price Glory. based on the World War1 experiences of his collaborator, Laurence Stallings. A prodigious variety of themes—many treated in blank verse—attracted him as his career progressed across high points such as Elizabeth the Queen, Valley Forge, Saturday's Children, Anne of the Thousand Days, Joan of Lorraine (starring Ingrid Bergman), The Bad Seed, Knickerbocker Holiday, a musical which included September Song. A founder of the producing group known as the Playwrights' Company, Anderson saw 33 of his plays produced on Broadway.
Died. Dmitry Zakharovich Manuilsky, 75, charter Bolshevik, witty, white-haired Ukrainian cynic, reportedly Stalin's "eye and ear" on the purge-bent Comintern, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian S.S.R. (1944-53), onetime Ukrainian representative at the U.N.; in Kiev. As early as 1934, Manuilsky called the Chinese Communists one of the "chief military detachments of the Communist International," flexingly said: "Communists in all countries have learned from Comrade Stalin how to fight and conquer. Under the banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin we will conquer the world."