21 Lives in 2013

A decorated soldier. A pioneering scientist. A best-selling novelist. A beloved world leader. To remember a year is to remember those remarkable people the world lost, and to acknowledge their legacies. In 21 Lives, The Washington Post collects a selection of its most resonant obituaries from 2013 into one compilation. It commemorates lives of people both as globally renowned as Nelson Mandela and Chinua Achebe, as noteworthy in their fields as Esther Williams and Virginia Johnson, and as colorful as Gussie Moran and Josh Burdette. It acknowledges both the loved and the feared, spanning a lifetime of experiences and memories, and it precisely captures the human scale of how the world changed in 2013.