Died. Anne Sexton, 45, suburban housewife who turned to poetry during a nervous breakdown 18 years ago and proceeded to write seven books of searingly personal verse, including the Pulitzer-prizewinning Live or Die (1966); apparently by her own hand (carbon-monoxide inhalation); in Weston, Mass. Clearly intrigued in her poems by the thought of her own death, Sexton survived a number of suicide attempts. After the 1963 suicide of Fellow Poet Sylvia Plath, Sexton recalled discussions the two had had in the late 1950s: "We talked about death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawing to it like moths to a light bulb. Sucking on it."

Died. Colonel Hans Handler, 63, commander since 1965 of Vienna's 400-year-old Spanish Riding School, home of the white Lipizzaner stallions; of a stroke while putting his horse Siglavy Beja through its paces in the riding hall of Vienna's Imperial Castle.

Died. Billie Goodson Pierce, 67, percussive, nimble-fingered jazz pianist and blues singer who once served briefly as Bessie Smith's accompanist and blossomed in the 1960s as co-leader, with her blind, horn-playing husband DeDe Pierce, of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, elderly but exuberant purveyors of classic New Orleans sound; of kidney and liver disease; in New Orleans.

Died. Spyridon Marinates, 73, redoubtable dean of Greek archaeologists, who in 1967 unearthed the remains of an ancient city of 20,000 buried beneath volcanic ash on the Aegean island of Thera; of a skull fracture suffered in a fall at the Thera dig site. A center of ancient Minoan culture, Thera was practically wiped out overnight in a massive eruption about 1500 B.C., leading Marinates to surmise, though less strenuously than some of his colleagues, that its destruction was the basis for Plato's account of the lost island of Atlantis.

Died. Schneor Zalman Shazar, 84, spirited, scholarly President of Israel from 1963 to 1973; in Jerusalem. A Zionist and socialist during his youth in Russia, Shazar emigrated in 1924 to Palestine, where he edited the labor movement newspaper Davar. Poet, historian and compelling orator, he helped write Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 and served as the new state's first Education Minister before assuming --as a "man without enemies," in Premier David Ben-Gurion's phrase--the primarily ceremonial presidency. More traditional a Jew than many Zionist leaders, Shazar regularly played host to fellow Bible researchers at his official residence and was an active devotee of the joyous Hasidic movement.

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