List of Famous people who died in 1979

Captain Thomas Pitt Hamilton Cholmondeley, 4th Baron Delamere, styled The Honourable Thomas Cholmondeley from birth until 1931, was a British peer. Popularly known as Tom Delamere, he lived on and owned the vast estate known as Soysambu Ranch in Kenya.

Leverett A. Saltonstall was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts. He served three two-year terms as the 55th Governor of Massachusetts, and for more than twenty years as a United States Senator (1945–1967). Saltonstall was internationalist in foreign policy and moderate on domestic policy, serving as a well-liked mediating force in the Republican Party. He was the only member of the Republican Senate leadership to vote for the censure of Joseph McCarthy.

Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.

Bertil Gotthard Ohlin was a Swedish economist and politician. He was a professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics from 1929 to 1965. He was also leader of the People's Party, a social-liberal party which at the time was the largest party in opposition to the governing Social Democratic Party, from 1944 to 1967. He served briefly as Minister for Trade from 1944 to 1945 in the Swedish coalition government during World War II. He was President of the Nordic Council in 1959 and 1964.

Theodora Covel Kracaw Kroeber Quinn was an American writer and anthropologist, best known for her accounts of several Native Californian cultures. Born in Denver, Colorado, Kroeber grew up in the mining town of Telluride, before enrolling in the University of California, Berkeley, for undergraduate and graduate studies. Married once in 1921 and widowed in 1923, in 1926 she married anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. She had two children with Kroeber, and two others from her first marriage. The Kroebers traveled together to many of Alfred's field sites, including an archaeological dig in Peru. Nine years after Alfred's death in 1960, Theodora Kroeber married artist John Quinn.