New York writer Peter Kaldheim passed away in Barcelona last Friday. While delivering a monologue, authorities from the Medical Emergency System announced the news from the Cronopios room in Barcelona to reporters at EFE.
Three emergency services teams reached the scene and attempted to resuscitate the author. He died in the same room in Barcelona, according to those same sources.
La Vanguardia reported the sudden death of Kaldheim on Saturday, noting that he began his literary career in his homeland during the 1970s.
An English literature graduate from Dartmouth College in the United States, his career as a writer and editor faced a period of disruption due to drug and alcohol addiction. Those struggles even led him to serve time in Rikers Island, New York.
After his release in the 1980s, he traveled across the United States with little family or money, living on the streets and riding freight trains in a manner that evoked memories of the Great Depression and the peril that came with it.
His sole volume, The Stupid Wind, published by Planeta in Spain, brought him to Barcelona in 2020. There he formed a deep bond with the city and developed a renewed interest in Catalan literature, alongside his work in Spanish.
According to La Vanguardia, he admired writers such as Jack Kerouac and Roberto Bolaño and often described himself as a passionate person. It was reported that his first public performance in Spanish, planned for yesterday, excited him greatly as a reader and as a mentor, though it left his second novel unfinished.
The figure known as the last of the Beat Generation’s followers will be returned to the United States to complete the final chapter of his life there.