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Andy Warhol liked to fudge the date of his birth. It was 1929, he would say, or 1931, or 1933. Sometimes he'd give his hometown as Providence, Rhode Island, or Cleveland, Ohio. He died after routine gall-bladder surgery, for reasons that are still not entirely known. The date of his death—February 22, 1987—was instantly memorialized by the media here and abroad. As reporters pieced together their obituaries of the artist, the puzzle of his age reappeared. Soon afterward, his headstone declared that he was born on August 6, 1928. This was Warhol's true birth date, say his two older brothers; they add that he was born and grew up in Pittsburgh.