He died of a brain tumor at age 39 in 1937.

BBC Music Magazine (September) ran an article speculating about what composers might have accomplished had they lived longer.

Here’s what Malcolm Hayes wrote about Gershwin:

“And while his Russian-émigré Jewish roots do not at first seem to have been an issue for him, some of his correspondence in the 1930s shows that his

awareness of the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany was beginning to change this. It is very possible that, like his close friend Schoenberg, and also

Kurt Weill, Gershwin after World War II would have taken an interest in the foundation of the state of Israel—with fruitful, if hard to gauge consequences

for that country’s musical story, and perhaps that of Europe also, as well as America.”