Thomas Berger, ‘Little Big Man’ Author

Thomas Berger, the reclusive and bitingly satirical novelist who explored the myths of the American West in “Little Big Man” and the mores of 20th-century middle-class society in a shelf of other well-received books, died on July 13 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 89.

His agent, Cristina Concepcion, said she learned of his death, at Nyack Hospital, on Monday. Mr. Berger lived in Grand View, a village in Rockland County, N.Y., where he had remained fiercely protective of his privacy.

Mr. Berger fell into that category of novelists whose work is admired by critics, devoured by devoted readers and even assigned in modern American literature classes but who owe much of their popularity to Hollywood. “Little Big Man,” published in 1964, is widely known for Arthur Penn’s film adaptation, released in 1970, starring Dustin Hoffman as the protagonist, Jack Crabb.

The novel, told in Crabb’s voice at the age of 111, recounts his life on the Great Plains as an adopted Cheyenne and makes the claim that he was the only white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But Mr. Berger’s body of work was far broader than that, and it earned him a reputation as an American original, if an underrecognized one. The author and scholar Thomas R. Edwards, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1980, called him “one of our most intelligent, witty and independent-minded writers.” “Our failure to read and discuss him,” Mr. Edwards added, “is a national disgrace.”

Photo

Dustin Hoffman in “Little Big Man” (1970), based on Mr. Berger’s novel about a survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Credit MPI, via Getty Images

To many critics, “Little Big Man” was Mr. Berger’s best novel and a worthy addition to the American canon. (The Dial Press plans a 50th-anniversary trade paperback edition this year.) “Few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much fiber and blood of the national experience in them,” the historian and novelist Frederick Turner wrote in The Nation in 1977.

Brooks Landon, Mr. Berger’s biographer, placed “Little Big Man” in a tradition of American frontier literature begun by James Fenimore Cooper. Henry Miller heard echoes of Mark Twain in it.

Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South

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Maya Angelou, the memoirist, poet and author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” died Wednesday. Her manuscripts are being preserved at the Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library. Credit Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

 

 Ms. Angelou in 1991, dancing with the poet Amiri Baraka, who died in January. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times 

 

Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married — it appears to have been at least three — for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)

After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence — she was six feet tall — she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.

But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.

Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.

“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”

Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start tomorrow.”

 

Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

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Harvey Weinstein remembers García Marquez

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

Writer-Environmentalist Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen's Works Include "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord"

a rich man's son who spurned a life of ease in favor of physical and spiritual challenges and produced such acclaimed works as "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," died Saturday. He was 86. His publisher Geoff Kloske of Riverhead Books said Mr. Matthiessen, who had been diagnosed with leukemia, was ill "for some months." He died at a hospital near his home on Long Island.

Mr. Matthiessen helped found The Paris Review, one of the most influential literary magazines, and won National Book Awards for "The Snow Leopard," his spiritual account of the Himalayas, and for "Shadow Country." His new novel, "In Paradise," is scheduled for publication Tuesday. 

A leading environmentalist and wilderness writer, he embraced the best and worst that nature could bring him, whether trekking across the Himalayas, parrying sharks in Australia or enduring a hurricane in Antarctica.

He was a longtime liberal who befriended Cesar Chavez and wrote a defense of Indian activist Leonard Peltier, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," that led to a highly publicized, and unsuccessful, lawsuit by an FBI agent who claimed Mr. Matthiessen had defamed him.

Mr. Matthiessen was born in New York in 1927, the son of Erard A. Matthiessen, a wealthy architect and conservationist. While at Yale, he wrote the short story "Sadie," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he soon acquired an agent. After graduation he moved to Paris and, along with fellow writer-adventurer George Plimpton, helped found The Paris Review. (Mr. Matthiessen would later acknowledge he was a CIA recruit at the time and used his work with the Review as a cover).


The magazine caught on, but Paris only reminded Mr. Matthiessen that he was an American writer. In the mid-1950s, he returned to the U.S., moved to Long Island's Sag Harbor (where he eventually lived on a six-acre estate), socialized with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other painters, operated a deep-sea fishing charter boat — and wrote.

In 1961, Mr. Matthiessen emerged as a major novelist with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," his tale of missionaries under siege from both natives and mercenaries in the jungles of Brazil. Its detailed account of a man's hallucinations brought him a letter of praise from LSD guru Timothy Leary. The book was later adapted into a film of the same name, starring John Lithgow and Daryl Hannah.

In the 1980s and '90s, Mr. Matthiessen published a trio of novels—"Killing Mr. Watson," ''Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone"—about a community in Florida's Everglades at the turn of the 20th century and a predatory planter. Unhappy, especially with "Lost Man's River," he spent years revising and condensing all three books into "Shadow Country," published in 2008 and a surprise National Book Award winner. Much of his fiction, from "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" to "Bone by Bone," bestowed a lion-like aura upon nature—grand when respected, dangerous when provoked, tragic when exploited.

Amiri Baraka

What an irony that he died in Beth Israel Hospital.

Gore Vidal

http://goo.gl/467Cb

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury died Wednesday in Los Angeles, his biographer has confirmed. He was 91. The science-fiction author was born in Illinois, a descendant of Mary Bradbury, a woman who was tried and hanged as a witch in the Salem witch trials. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947, and a chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore put him in touch with respected critic Charles Isherwood, who then gave a glowing review to The Martian Chronicles. Three years later, Bradbury became a household name with the publication of Fahrenheit 451, the story of a book-burning future. The author of 11 novels, Bradbury also published numerous short-story collections, plays, screenplays, and graphic novels. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

 Among the many things being said about Bradbury, that is a surprise to me: that he was a descendant of Mary Bradbury, a woman who was tried and hanged as a witch in the Salem witch trials.

Carlos Fuentes

Anthony De Palma euloguizes him in the New York Times: Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world, died on Tuesday in Mexico City. Mr. Fuentes was one the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s known as “El Boom.” He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and more than a dozen novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love, that were acclaimed throughout Latin America. Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. The first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border, it was made into a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, released in 1989.

In the tradition of Latin American writers, Mr. Fuentes was an outspoken public intellectual, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticized the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. Mr. Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He initially supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He openly sympathized with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, and publicly skewered the administration of George W. Bush. Mr. Fuentes was appointed Mexico’s ambassador to France in 1975, but he resigned two years later to protest the appointment of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz as ambassador to Spain. Mr. Díaz Ordaz had been president of Mexico in 1968 when Mexican troops opened fire on student protesters in Mexico City.
An unusual commitment to his ideals.


Mr. Fuentes is survived by his wife, Silvia Lemus, and a daughter, Cecilia, by a previous marriage to the actress Rita Macedo, who died in 1973. Two children from his marriage to Ms. Lemus, Carlos and Natasha, died before him.

How unusual, that bith children died before him.

Time magazine also eulogizes him. Author Carlos Fuentes, who played a dominant role in Latin America's novel-writing boom by delving into the failed ideals of the Mexican revolution, died Tuesday in a Mexico City hospital. He was 83. Mexico's National Council for Culture for the Arts confirmed the death of Mexico's most celebrated novelist. The cause was not immediately known, said the culture official, who was not authorized to speak to the media. Mexican media reported Fuentes died at the Angeles del Pedregal hospital, where he was being treated for heart problems. The loss was immediately mourned worldwide via Twitter and across Mexican airwaves.

In fact, I learned about his passing via Twitter. And there I also saw the tribute given him by Yaoni Sánchez.

Novelist of life in Nazi-run Europe

Hans Keilson, a German-born psychoanalyst who won literary fame at the very end of his long life when two of his long-forgotten works of fiction, set in Nazi-occupied Europe, were republished to great acclaim, died on Tuesday in Hilversum, the Netherlands. He was 101. Dr. Keilson, a physician by training, published his first novel at 23. That book, “Life Goes On,” offered a dark picture of German political life between the wars, reflected in the troubles encountered by Max, a Jewish store owner modeled on Dr. Keilson’s father, a textile merchant. It was banned by the Nazis in 1934.

Two years later Dr. Keilson emigrated to the Netherlands with his future wife, Gertrud Manz. He began a new novel, “The Death of the Adversary,” about a young Jewish man’s experiences in Germany as the Nazis gain a grip on power, but he put the manuscript aside after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 forced him to live in hiding in Delft. His experiences provided the material for the novella “Comedy in a Minor Key,” about a Dutch couple who shelter an elderly Jew who dies of natural causes. After disposing of the body carelessly, they too must go into hiding. The novella was published by a German-language Amsterdam press in 1947, the same year Anne Frank’s diary was released. “The Death of the Adversary,” which Dr. Keilson resumed writing after the war, came out in Germany in 1959, and a stilted English translation appeared in 1962. A brief notice in The New York Times described it as a “novel of suspense.” Although the novel sold well and Time magazine named it one of the top 10 books of the year, along with works like Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Ship of Fools,” Dr. Keilson slipped into literary obscurity. He wrote no more fiction, he later said, because he believed that he no longer had an audience.

In 2007 Damion Searls, a literary translator,chanced upon "Comedy in a Minor Key" in an Austrian bookstore's sidewalk bargain bin and mounted a successful campaign to resurrect Dr. Keilson's works. In 2010 Farrar, Straus & Giroux  reissued "The Death of the Adversary"  which was translated to English by Ivo Jarosy in 1962.Mr. Searls's translation of "Comedy in a Minor Key," was also published in Britain by Hesperus Press. The novelist Francine Prose, in The New York Times Book Review, declared both works masterpieces and their author a genius. “Rarely have such harrowing narratives been related with such wry, off-kilter humor, and in so quiet a whisper,” she wrote. “Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers.” 

After his first novel was banned, his publisher, Samuel Fischer, told him to leave Germany as quickly as possible. His future wife, a graphologist, had also sensed impending disaster. After Dr. Keilson showed her a sample of Hitler’s handwriting in 1935, she said, “He’s going to set the world on fire.”

Maury Allen

Stephen J. Cannell

Legendary TV producer Stephen J. Cannell has died
By Alan Duke, CNN
October 1, 2010 -- Updated 2026 GMT (0426 HKT)


Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Television producer Stephen J. Cannell, known for his work on shows including "21 Jump Street" and "The A-Team," died Thursday, his publicist said. Cannell was 69. Cannell died from complications associated with melanoma at his Pasadena, California, home surrounded by family and loved ones, said a family statement.

He created, wrote and produced several iconic TV series, starting in the 1970s with "The Rockford Files."

We watched that show regularly, and really liked it.

His other hit series included: "Greatest American Hero," "The A-Team," "Hunter," "Riptide," "Hardcastle & McCormick," "21 Jump Street," "Wiseguy," "The Commish," "Profit," and syndicated shows "Renegade" and "Silk Stalkings."


Viewers may best remember the trademark closing for Cannell's productions, which showed him at a typewriter tossing a sheet of paper over his shoulder.

I do remember.

He also acted, sometimes appearing in his own shows. Cannell had a recurring role on ABC-TV's hit series "Castle."

Cannell authored 16 novels, including the "Shane Scully" series.

He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Marcia, three children and three grandchildren, the family said. Cannell overcame severe dyslexia as a child growing up in Pasadena, and later became a spokesman for the International Dyslexia Associationand an advocate for children and adults with learning disabilities. He formed an independent production company, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, in 1979, which gave him control and ownership of his shows. His studio is developing feature film versions of several of his hit TV shows, including "21 Jump Street" and "The Greatest American Hero." "The A-Team" movie was released in theaters last summer.

CNN's Jack Hannah contributed to this report.

‘Bonanza’ Creator

Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times - David Dortort in 2009.


David Dortort, a television writer and producer whose idea to create a western drama based not on shoot-’em-ups but instead on the travails of a loving family resulted in “Bonanza,” one of the most popular shows in history, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 93. The cause was uncertain, but he had a history of heart problems, said his daughter, Wendy Czarnecki.

In 1958 Mr. Dortort, an experienced television writer, had also become one of the first writer-producers in television drama. He was serving both functions on a successful half-hour western, “The Restless Gun,” starring John Payne in the traditional Hollywood role of a roving gunman who settles the conflict in each episode — and establishes right and wrong — by shooting the bad guy.

The show was broadcast on NBC, and that network asked Mr. Dortort to develop a western for NBC itself to produce, an opportunity that Mr. Dortort, who studied American history at City College of New York and believed his familiarity with the subject was the equal of that of anyone in Hollywood, seized upon to combat what he called “the myth of the lone gunfighter.” He pitched a show set on a Nevada ranch on the shore of Lake Tahoe after the 1859 discovery of the gold and silver deposits known as the Comstock Lode in Virginia City. Rather than focusing on a single hero, the show would have four: a father, widowed three times, and his three sons. The idea of “Bonanza,” as the show came to be called, was to depict the story of the American West — “one of the great migrations of all time,” he called it — with accuracy.

Ben Cartwright, and his sons Adam, Hoss and Little Joe. I can hear, and can hum, the music to the opening of the show.


“The gunfighter played a small, inconsequential role in the story of the West,” Mr. Dortort explained in a 2002 interview with the Archive of American Television. “The true history of the West is about family, pioneers.”

Because the show was to be partly shot on location, and because color television sets were on the verge of being readily available to consumers, Mr. Dortort urged the network to film “Bonanza” in color, and it became television’s first full-hour western in color, which helped distinguish it from competitors like “Laramie” and “Gunsmoke.” It starred Lorne Greene as Ben Cartwright, the family patriarch (whom Mr. Dortort named after his own father), and, as his sons, Pernell Roberts as the eldest and the most intellectual, Adam; Dan Blocker as the sweet-tempered giant Eric, better known as Hoss; and Michael Landon as the impetuous, hotheaded Little Joe.

“Bonanza” appeared for the first time at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 12, 1959, opposite “Perry Mason” on CBS. Two years later it moved to 9 p.m. on Sunday and became a dominant hit, running for 14 seasons — including three years, from 1964 to 1967, when it was the most-watched television show in the country. Mr. Dortort oversaw production of the show for most of its run. In addition to telling stories based on historical events involving the Comstock Lode and the oncoming Civil War, the show dealt with themes like racial prejudice and religious tolerance. Mostly, though, its drama, and its popularity, were because of its focus on the Cartwrights and their tightknit bond.

“What is the message?” Mr. Dortort said. “Love is the message.”


David Solomon Katz was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe on Oct. 23, 1916, and grew up in a neighborhood famous for the gangsters of Murder Inc., a milieu he mined for one of his two novels, “Burial of the Fruit” (1947). His second book, “The Post of Honor,” came out two years later. His father, Beryl Dortort, who came to this country, according to family lore, to avoid going to rabbinical school, changed his name to Benjamin Katz and became a successful insurance salesman. Young David graduated from Boys High in Brooklyn and City College, where he studied not only history but also creative writing and was a writing-seminar colleague of Alfred Kazin. He met his future wife, Rose Seldin, an accountant, after he graduated. They married in 1940. It was she who persuaded him to change his name back to his father’s original one.

Drafted after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he served in special services in Torrance, Calif., starting a newspaper and arranging for performances by Hollywood entertainers at an Army hospital. “Burial of the Fruit” was optioned for a film, and he was hired to write it, but it was never made, an experience that made him determined to learn how to write for the screen.

His early movie credits include “The Lusty Men” (1952), a western, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Susan Hayward and Robert Mitchum, and “A Cry in the Night” (1956), a police drama about a kidnapping, with Natalie Wood. His television work included episodes of “Racket Squad” and “Lassie,” and adaptations of the Walter Van Tilburg Clark novel “The Ox-Bow Incident.” In 1967 Mr. Dortort turned his primary focus away from “Bonanza” to create a second western drama, “The High Chaparral,” set in the 1870s in the American Southwest and starring Leif Erickson as the head of another fragmented ranch family. That show ran for four years.

Mr. Dortort’s wife, Rose, died in 2007. In addition to his daughter, who lives in Petaluma, Calif., he is survived by a brother, Elliot Katz, of Marlboro, N.J.; a son, Fred Dortort, of Berkeley, Calif.; and a step-granddaughter.
September 9, 2010
David Dortort, ‘Bonanza’ Creator, Dies at 93
By BRUCE WEBER

Louis Auchincloss

January 28, 2010
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and CHARLES McGRATH


Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer from a prominent old New York family who became a durable and prolific chronicler of Manhattan’s old-money elite, died on Tuesday night in Manhattan. He was 92. His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was caused by complications of a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Auchincloss lived on the Upper East Side.


Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. He was best known for his dozens and dozens of novels about what he called the “comfortable” world, which in the 1930s meant “an apartment or brownstone in town, a house in the country, having five or six maids, two or three cars, several clubs and one’s children in private schools.”


This was the world he came from, and its customs and secrets were his subject from the beginning. He persisted in writing about it, fondly but also trenchantly, long after that world had begun to vanish.


Mr. Auchincloss’s last book, published in 2008, was “The Last of the Old Guard,” and though it was set at the turn of the 20th century, the title in many ways fit the author himself. Mr. Auchincloss had a beaky, patrician nose and spoke with a high-pitched Brahmin accent. He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue.


Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.


Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. “Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”

His detractors complained that Mr. Auchincloss’s writing was glib and superficial, or else that his subject matter was too dated to be of much interest. Writing in The New York Times in 1984, Michiko Kakutani said that while Mr. Auchincloss “is adept enough at portraying the effects of a rarefied milieu on character, his narrative lacks a necessary density and texture.”


“Like the shiny parquet floors of their apartment houses,” she added, “Mr. Auchincloss’s people are just a little too finely polished, a little too tidily assembled.”

The author Bruce Bawer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Auchincloss had the bad luck to live “in a time when the protagonists of literary fiction tend to be middle- or lower-class.”


“These days,” he added, “the general public, though fascinated by the superficial trappings of privilege, seems to have little interest in the deeper truths with which Mr. Auchincloss is passionately concerned — with, that is, the beliefs, principles, hypocrisies, prejudices and assorted strengths and defects of character that typify the American WASP civilization that produced what was for a long time the country’s undisputed ruling class.”

“Class prejudice” was Mr. Auchincloss’s response to his critics. “That business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an author writes about is purely class prejudice,” he said in an interview in 1997, “and you will note that it always disappears with an author’s death. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.”


Louis Stanton Auchincloss (pronounced AW-kin-kloss) was born on Sept. 27, 1917, in Lawrence, on Long Island, joining an upper-crust clan of Auchinclosses, Dixons, Howlands and Stantons. Since 1803, when Hugh Auchincloss left Paisley, Scotland, to establish a New York branch of the family dry goods business, the families all lived in Manhattan — all with money, all with high social positions.


Louis was the third of four children of Priscilla Stanton and Joseph Howland Auchincloss, who, like his father, was a Wall Street lawyer; he was also a third cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Louis was a cousin by marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who worked with him when she was a book editor later in life.)

Born Into Money

Mr. Auchincloss grew up in a world of town houses, summer homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor, Me., private clubs and servants, debutante parties and travel abroad. Yet as a child he thought of himself as neither rich nor aristocratic.


“Like most children of affluence,” he said in his 1974 autobiography, “A Writer’s Capital,” “I grew up with a distinct sense that my parents were only tolerably well off. This is because children always compare their families with wealthier ones, never with poorer. I thought I knew perfectly well what it meant to be rich in New York. If you were rich, you lived in a house with a pompous beaux-arts facade and kept a butler and gave children’s parties with spun sugar on the ice cream and little cups of real silver as game prizes. If you were not rich you lived in a brownstone with Irish maids who never called you Master Louis and parents who hollered up and down the stairs instead of ringing bells.”


He attended the Bovee School for Boys on Fifth Avenue and entered the Groton School in Massachusetts in 1929. Unathletic and unpopular, he found Groton a difficult place at first with its punishments, its cold New England weather, its compulsory cold showers and its emphasis on sports. Gradually, he earned his place. His first short stories were published in the school magazine, the Grotonian, of which he became editor.


Enrolling at Yale in 1935, he also wrote stories for its school magazine and yearned for a literary life. When he visited his father’s law offices, he said, “those dark narrow streets and those tall, sooty towers” filled him with gloom. At Yale he made Phi Beta Kappa and while a junior completed a novel modeled on “Madame Bovary,” about a New York socialite. The book was rejected by Scribner’s, and he rashly decided “that a man born to the responsibilities of a brownstone bourgeois world could only be an artist or writer if he were a genius.” So he dropped out of Yale before his senior year and entered the University of Virginia law school.


To his surprise he found he liked the law, particularly estates law, and in 1941, after earning a law degree, he joined the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When World War II began Mr. Auchincloss enlisted in the Navy. He served in Naval intelligence, then commanded a craft that shuttled troops and the wounded across the English Channel during the Normandy invasion.


After the invasion he was sent to the Pacific and while onboard a ship to Japan wrote another novel, only to throw it in the trash. He finally began his writing career with “The Indifferent Children,” a novel published by Prentice-Hall in 1947 after he had returned to Sullivan & Cromwell. It appeared under the pseudonym Andrew Lee, in deference to his mother, who thought the book “trivial and vulgar” and feared it would damage his career.


But the novel received favorable reviews and encouraged him to keep writing while also practicing law. “I think my secret is to use bits and fractions of time,” he said in his 1997 interview. “I trained myself to do that. Anybody can do it. I could write sitting in surrogate’s court answering calendar call.”

His short stories were soon appearing under his own name in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines. They were collected in “The Injustice Collectors,” published in 1950 by Houghton Mifflin, which also brought out the rest of his fiction.

A Lawyer and an Author

In 1951 Mr. Auchincloss resigned from Sullivan & Cromwell, underwent psychoanalysis “to find out, once and for all, who I am,” as he said in his autobiography, and began writing full time. Three years later he returned to the law, joining Hawkins, Delafield & Wood, another Wall Street firm, where he specialized in trusts and estates, a white-shoe specialty that deals exclusively with private individuals. He became a partner and remained at Hawkins, Delafield until he retired in 1987. He wrote that at some point he stopped thinking of himself as a lawyer or a writer.

“I was simply doing what I was doing when I did it,” he explained.

“The Rector of Justin” (1964), which was a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award, is regarded by many critics as Mr. Auchincloss’s best and most important novel. Its protagonist is Frank Prescott, the headmaster of a New England boys’ school before the war, a man of intellect and idealism who could be noble, generous and kind but also, by turns, cruel, callous and arbitrary. Many readers assumed Prescott to be Endicott Peabody, founder of the Groton School and a great educator of his day. But Mr. Auchincloss said it was as much a portrait of the federal judge Learned Hand, whom Mr. Auchincloss regarded as the greatest man he had known.

Mr. Auchincloss earned praise for his 1966 novel “The Embezzler,” another best seller. But in writing it he was also accused of disloyalty to his class by portraying its failings and decline through the story of a Wall Street embezzler of the 1930s. Members of the Whitney family were said to have tried to dissuade him from publishing the book, which drew on the case of Richard Whitney, a president of the New York Stock Exchange who went to prison for misappropriating funds from, among other places, the New York Yacht Club.

There was an element of moral judgment in all of Mr. Auchincloss’s fiction. An individual’s need to stand up to convention was an early theme, as in “The Romantic Egoists” (1954); guilt-driven self-destruction was another, as in “The Great World and Timothy Colt” (1956), the first of many novels about upper-crust lawyers.

More recently “The Education of Oscar Fairfax” (1995) tells a partly autobiographical story about a well-born Social Register type who abandons his dream of a literary career to join his father’s law firm. “East Side Story” (2004) traces a family not unlike the Auchinclosses from the Civil War to the war in Vietnam.

Among his many other novels were “The House of Five Talents” (1960), “Portrait in Brownstone” (1962), “A World of Profit” (1968), “Honorable Men” (1985), “Diary of a Yuppie” (1986) and “The Headmaster’s Dilemma” (2007).

Mr. Auchincloss also published numerous collections of short stories and literary essays as well as biographies. (Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were subjects.) And he edited many works that reflected his concerns with power, class and money in America; among these were “An Edith Wharton Reader,” “The Vanderbilt Era” and “J. P. Morgan: The Financier as Collector.”

A Leader in Civic Life

Mr. Auchincloss was a man of the city he knew so intimately, serving as president and chairman of the Museum of the City of New York and chairman of the City Hall Restoration Committee. He was a fixture at the Century Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where he also served as president.

In 2005 President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Arts.

His wife, Adele Lawrence Auchincloss, an artist, environmentalist and former deputy administrator of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department, died in 1991. Besides his son Andrew, of Manhattan, he is survived by two other sons, John, of Weston, Conn., and Blake, of Hingham, Mass; a brother, Howland, of Cazenovia, N.Y.; and seven grandchildren.

Even near the end of his life, Mr. Auchincloss said the influence of his class had not waned. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I’m still living in one!,” he told The Financial Times in 2007. “The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs — all the old clubs — are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.”

“Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about?” he asked. “I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the location of the Groton School and the name of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Dennis Hevesi contributed reporting.

Writer in the Window

Courtesy of Cissie Ludlow - Georgelle Hirliman in 1988.

February 20, 2010
Georgelle Hirliman, ‘Writer in the Window,’With Answers, Is Dead at 73
By MARGALIT FOX


Q. Dear Writer in the Window: If life is a stage, why do we take it so seriously?


A. Because it requires Method acting.

Georgelle Hirliman, whose innovative solution to writer’s block a quarter-century ago gave her a national career as a performance artist — and a book to boot — died on Jan. 29 in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 73 and a Santa Fe resident. The cause was cancer, said Devon Ludlow, a longtime friend.

In 1984, hopelessly blocked on a novel, Ms. Hirliman hit on the idea of setting up shop with her typewriter in a Santa Fe storefront. Beside her, she placed a sign: Help Me Cure My Writer’s Block — Give Me a Topic.

People stopped and stared. Before long they began scribbling questions on slips of paper and taping them to the window. (Q. Where do the ducks go when ponds freeze over?) Ms. Hirliman fired off brief, aphoristic replies and taped them back up for all to see. (A. Warm, chlorinated pools in Miami and Beverly Hills.)

She never wrote her novel, but it no longer mattered: Ms. Hirliman was soon appearing in windows across the United States and Canada, her work widely reported in the news media. In Manhattan she wrote in the windows of The Village Voice, Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper West Side and B. Dalton on Fifth Avenue, among other places, sitting daily for eight hours at a stretch. Store owners paid her $50 to $100 a day, New York magazine reported in 1985.

Ms. Hirliman’s project resulted in a volume of questions and answers, “Dear Writer in the Window: The Wit and Wisdom of a Sidewalk Sage,” published by Penguin Books in 1992. She later reworked her window act as a one-woman stage show, which she performed around the country.

Before Ms. Hirliman began writing in windows she was variously, by her own account in interviews over the years, a model, journalist, secretary, tarot card reader, astrologer, cigarette girl and call girl. “Being a call girl is a very giving profession, just like writing,” she told The Washington Post in 1992.

Georgelle Cynthia Hirliman was born in Los Angeles on June 11, 1936. She was adopted as a baby by Eleanor Hunt, a Hollywood actress, and her husband, George A. Hirliman, who produced “Reefer Madness” and other films. Georgelle, who moved with her family to New York as a girl, was unhappy at home and left as a teenager.

Ms. Hirliman settled in Santa Fe in the early 1970s. In 1982 she published a nonfiction book, “The Hate Factory” (Dell). Written with W. G. Stone, it chronicled the notorious 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, in which 33 inmates were killed and scores injured.

Ms. Hirliman’s daughter, Heather Anne Marchetto, died of cancer last year. Her sister, Kathy Perlman, is her only immediate survivor.

As she sat in windows across America, Ms. Hirliman entertained all manner of questions, some vast (Q. Why is there Anything rather than Nothing at all? A. After timeless eons of Nothingness, anything seemed a better idea), some small (Q. What is an appropriate collective noun for freckles? A. A frieze of freckles). In later years, she answered still more questions through her Web site, writerinthewindow.com.

But there was one question Ms. Hirliman would not entertain:

Q. How much is that writer in the window?

“I stopped answering that,” she told The Albuquerque Journal in 2000. “Nobody paid.”

Her website has some of the Q & As:

Book Stop Albuquerque 11/24/00
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS?
Democrats lie to us. Republicans lie to themselves.

David Foster Wallace

I don't know his work, and had not heard of him before reading this, I do believe, but having come across his name in the Q&A session conducted by Bruce Weber, obituary writer for the New York Times, and hyperlinking to his obituary, I became interest ed. Reading that obituary, my interest turned to fascination.


He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian.

In contrast to the lively spirit of his writing, Mr. Wallace was a temperamentally unassuming man, long-haired, unhappy in front of a camera, consumed with his work and its worth, perpetually at odds with himself. Journalists who interviewed him invariably commented on his discomfort with celebrity and his self-questioning. And those who knew him best concurred that Mr. Wallace was a titanically gifted writer with an equally troubled soul.

An Appreciation: Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok (September 15, 2008)

Paper Cuts: His Head Pounded Like a Heart (September 15, 2008)

Dick Francis

English. Jockey. Writer.

The Guardian: Sport: Horse Racing: Dick Francis obituary

NY Times: Books: Dick Francis, Jockey and Writer, Dies at 89

Telegraph: Books: Book News: Dick Francis dies aged 89

Wall Street Journal has it bylined from UK's Times: Comment: Obituaries: Dick Francis: the Times obituary

Had he remained in the racing world as a trainer or bloodstock consultant, after retiring from riding through injury in 1957, Dick Francis would have been remembered as one of the most successful National Hunt jockeys of his era — and as the man who spectacularly managed to lose out in the 1956 Grand National when he apparently had the entire field at his mercy. As it is, the photograph of him within a whisker of the finishing line, aboard the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch, flat on its belly with four legs helplessly splayed out, has provided one of the enduring enigmas of racing and one of its strangest images

BBC News: Arts and Culture: Author Dick Francis dies aged 89

LA Times has a blog entry.

alt.obituaries has posted the obit from the Guardian.

The most dramatic incident in his racing career was also a
mystery. In the Grand National at Aintree in 1956, his mount
Devon Loch, the Queen Mother's horse trained by Peter
Cazalet, had jumped all the fences and, well ahead, only 50
yards from the finish, without another horse near him,
suddenly collapsed and was unable to continue.

Some said the horse had attempted to jump an imaginary
fence; another theory, put up years later by Bill Braddon,
Cazalet's head lad, was that the girth was too tight and the
horse suddenly let loose an enormous fart. Braddon said he
had tightened the girth just before the off, "one notch up
and another for luck", without realising that Cazalet had
already done it in the saddling enclosure.

There was no question of Francis, like a crooked jockey out
of one of his own books, having pulled the horse. It had
been his great dream since he was a lad of eight in 1928 and
listened to the Grand National on the radio as Tipperary Tim
won at 100-1, to be a steeplechase jockey and win that
ultimate prize. Ironically, Devon Loch's melodramatic
collapse in front of a roaring crowd cheering him to the
finish has ensured Francis a place in the history of the
race he would not have had if he had been merely another
winner. 

Writer of both fact and fiction

Julius Fast, who won the first Edgar Award given by the Mystery Writers of America and went on to publish popular books on body language, the Beatles and human relationships, died on Tuesday in Kingston, New York. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Jennifer Fast Gelfand. He had lived in New York until suffering a stroke a year and a half ago.

Fast, the younger brother of the novelist Howard Fast, won instant acclaim as a mystery writer. "Watchful at Night," his first novel, was written while he was still in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. Its cover identified him as Sergeant Julius Fast. The book won the inaugural Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1946 for the best first novel published in 1945.

Fast followed up with several more detective novels, including "Walk in Shadow" (1947) and "A Model for Murder" (1956), before branching out into pop psychology, health and relationships. His most successful book, "Body Language" (1970), which analyzed the unconscious messages sent out by the human body, inspired several sequels, notably "The Body Language of Sex, Power and Aggression" (1976), "Body Politics" (1980) and "The Body Book" (1981).

Fast was born in New York in 1919. After earning a bachelor's degree at New York University, where he was a pre-med student, he spent three years in the army, which assigned him to a blood lab in Boston. While in the army he edited a collection of science fiction stories, "Out of This World" (1944), and then turned his hand to crime fiction.

In 1946 he married Barbara Sher, also a writer, who survives him, and with whom he wrote "Talking Between the Lines: How We Mean More Than We Say" (1979). Besides his daughter Jennifer, of Shady, New York, other survivors are a son, Timothy, of Des Moines; another daughter, Melissa Morgan of Casselberry, Florida; and five grandchildren. Howard Fast died in 2003.

To support his growing family, Fast worked as a writer and editor at several medical magazines. A stint at a podiatric publication provided the raw material for "You and Your Feet" (1970), but his wide-ranging interests account for the variety in titles like "The Beatles: The Real Story" (1968), "The New Sexual Fulfillment" (1972) and "Weather Language" (1979).

In 1988 he published "What Should We Do About Davey?," a semiautobiographical novel about an awkward adolescent employed at a boys' camp in the Catskills that was very much like the one owned by Fast's uncle.

Often he wrote to order for publishers rushing a book into print on a timely subject, like the findings of the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Within months of the publication of "Human Sexual Response" in 1966, Fast produced "What You Should Know About Human Sexual Response." He also wrote books on how to quit smoking, how men and women can overcome their incompatibilities and the meaning of new research on Omega-3 fatty acids.

"Julius is a fast writer," said Tom Dardis, the editor who commissioned his Beatles book. "That's no pun on his name."

Julius Fast, 89, writer of both fact and fiction, is dead
By William Grimes
Published: Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Brooklyn literary descendant of James Joyce

Found this one in my paper files.

May 31, 2002
Wallace Markfield, 75, Writer With a Humorous Sarcasm


Wallace Markfield, the author of ''To an Early Grave,'' ''Teitlebaum's Window'' and other satirical novels that earned him critical praise as a Brooklyn literary descendant of James Joyce, died last Friday at a hospital in Roslyn, N.Y. He was 75 and lived in Port Washington, N.Y. The cause was complications from a heart attack, his family said.

To an early Grave was made into a film, Bye Bye Braverman.

Mr. Markfield was a little-known contributor to literary reviews and journals when he burst onto the scene in 1964 with his first novel, ''To an Early Grave,'' about the funeral of a young writer named Leslie Braverman, ''a second-rate talent of the highest order.'' In it, a group of Braverman's friends -- literary lights even dimmer than Braverman -- pile into a Volkswagen in Greenwich Village and head to Brooklyn for the funeral. The book takes place during a single day and follows the friends through misadventures along the way, including a drunken stop at the wrong funeral.

In 1968 the book was made into a film, ''Bye Bye Braverman,'' directed by Sidney Lumet and starring George Segal and Jack Warden, with an appearance by Alan King as a babbling rabbi.

Critics compared the novel to Joyce's ''Ulysses'' and praised its juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy. In a review in The New York Times, Charles Poore lauded Mr. Markfield's ''awesome talent for bridging the style of James Joyce with selections from the effects of the Theater of the Absurd playwrights.''

In ''To an Early Grave,'' ''Teitlebaum's Window'' (1970) and ''You Could Live If They Let You'' (1974), Mr. Markfield developed a style that contrasted his lofty literary aims with references to pop culture and a sarcastic sense of humor derived from stand-up comedy. Most of his stories and novels were set in Brooklyn and the dialogue was peppered with Yiddish phrases.

Philip Roth, in ''Portnoy's Complaint,'' wrote, ''The novelist, what's his name, Markfield, has written in a story somewhere that until he was 14 he believed 'aggravation' to be a Jewish word.'' He was referring to Mr. Markfield's story ''The Country of the Crazy Horse,'' which was published in Commentary in 1958.

Mr. Markfield was born in Brooklyn and began writing while an undergraduate at Brooklyn College. He graduated in 1948 and was a film critic at New Leader magazine from 1954 to 1955. He taught creative writing at San Francisco State College (now University), Kirkland College (which has since merged with Hamilton College) in Clinton, N.Y., and Queens College.

He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1965 after the publication of ''To an Early Grave.''

Mr. Markfield also wrote ''Multiple Orgasms,'' a short-story collection published in 1977; and ''Radical Surgery,'' a novel, in 1991. At the time of his death he had been working on a novel for 11 years, said his wife, Anna.

Besides his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Andrea Black, of Hudson, Mass., and three grandchildren.