May 7, 1931

Gene Wolfe (May 7, 1931 to April 14, 2019) sounds like one of the most famous people I was unaware of. Wolfe wrote science fiction and was much lauded. Some rank him right after Tolkien.  One obituary was headlined "Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art," and included these points:

'....Peace appears in 1975. It’s a fictional memoir set around the first half of the 20th century. But the story is odd, nonlinear, hard to piece together. The narrator’s status is elusive. Is he real? Is he insane? Is he a ghost? Neil Gaiman, who will fall in love with the novel many years later, will say that it’s a gentle memoir the first time you read it and a horror novel the second time.....

'His next book is a masterpiece. The Book of the New Sun, ... is published in four volumes during the early ’80s. Gene is 49 when The Shadow of the Torturer arrives in 1980, 52 when the fourth book, The Citadel of the Autarch, appears in 1983. The tetralogy is one of the great, weird triumphs of American imaginative literature, a story that fuses science fiction with pulp fantasy, then fuses both with modernist narrative technique, Catholic theology, and Proustian meditativeness. (The New York Times will add “Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness, and Wagnerian mythology,” for good measure.)...

'Yet the books don’t sell in large numbers, possibly because many people can’t make sense of them. He doesn’t inspire a wave of copycat writers, like William Gibson does around this time. He doesn’t conquer the bestseller lists like other creators of large-scale fantasy series. He doesn’t become a convention superstar like George R.R. Martin or a cultural icon like Le Guin. He’s written a work that proves (if you needed proof) that SF can be high art, yet not many people even within SF read it. He’s written one of the all-time masterworks of science fiction, and it’s hard to say whether he influences the genre at all.....[A]lthough he never does become famous...[it is] among writers that he’s most loved.'

Let's look at a review of Gene Wofe's "The Cat."
'"The Cat” was first published in the Souvenir book for the 1983 World Fantasy Convention. Gardner Dozois picked the story up for the inaugural volume of his long-running The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection and also reprinted the story in Magicats!, co-edited with Jack Dann. Wolfe included the story in his collection Endangered Species and later in the collection The Castle of the Otter, .... In 1990, the story was translated into French as “Le Chat,” and has been published in France at least three times.

'Set in Wolfe’s world of the New Sun, the events of “The Cat” follow the Chatelaine Sancha as related by the Steward Odilo. Relying on hearsay and rumor, Odilo is able to discuss Sancha’s life from the time she was a young girl until her death. Odilo begins with her friendship with Father Inire. Father Inire shows a teen-aged Sancha a device which accidentally causes her pet cat to disappear. Although heartbroken by the loss of her pet, Sancha moves on with her life, getting involved in scandals and intrigue, moving away from the House Absolute to marry, and eventually returning to the House Absolute in her old age, widowed and estranged from her son, the object of speculation as rumors of the old scandal re-emerged, and an object of mystery since, although she denied having a pet, she seemed to be accompanied by an invisible cat.....'

After Wolfe's recent death Neil Gaiman's praise was repeated in memoriam accounts:
'...He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy--possibly the finest living American writer. '