Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, of tuberculosis, in a sanatorium outside Vienna. He was 40. He left three unfinished novels, a substantial body of shorter fiction, letters, and diaries, and a note to his friend Max Brod instructing him to burn all of it — “everything I leave behind me… in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread.

Johannes Vermeer lived 43 years, fathered fifteen children, worked as an art dealer to support them, and left behind approximately 36 paintings. The number is not certain — attribution disputes move a few canvases in and out — but the range has never extended far past 40 in either direction. For a professional painter of the Dutch Golden Age, this is an almost implausibly small body of work. His contemporary Jan Steen produced over 800 paintings.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio arrived in Rome around 1592, at approximately 21, with no money, no connections, and a technique nobody in the city had seen before. He was dead by 1610, at 38 or 39, on a beach in Porto Ercole, probably of fever, possibly of lead poisoning from his own pigments, possibly of something worse. In between, he produced roughly 80 paintings that broke Western art into a before and an after — and killed a man in a street brawl, fled Rome as a fugitive, killed or badly wounded at least one other person in Malta, and spent the last four years of his life on the run from a papal death warrant.

In June 1816, Mary Godwin was eighteen years old and living in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron’s physician John Polidori, and Byron’s companion Claire Clairmont. The weather was catastrophically bad — cold, dark, and rainy throughout a summer that should have been Mediterranean. They were indoors most of the time, reading German ghost stories aloud and eventually agreeing on a competition: each of them would write a supernatural tale.

In December 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was led into Semyonovsky Square in St. Petersburg, bound to a post with two other condemned men, and prepared for execution by firing squad. He was 28. He had been convicted of involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of liberal intellectuals who had read and discussed banned texts, and the sentence was death. He had been in the Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months.

February 12, 1809. Two boys enter the world on the same day, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, into lives that could not be more different — and yet both will reshape the way humanity understands itself. Abraham Lincoln is born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky. His mother will die when he is nine. He will teach himself to read by firelight. He will grow up to hold a country together with his bare hands.