Obituaries
This page is about some people I admire a great deal for their insight in writing (or other art forms) or for their political or personal struggles in the world. There are a few comments by me and lots of links to material by others.
Chinua Achebe
Glenda Adams
Maya Angelou
Paul Auster
Amiri Baraka
Hortense Calisher
Jo Carson
Suzy McKee Charnas
William Demby
Joan Didion
Diane di Prima
Buchi Emecheta
Carol Emshwiller
Howard Fast
Maria Irene Fornes
Ernest Gaines
Tom Hayden
Chuck Kinder
Eva Kollisch
Edith Konecky
George Lies
Phillip Levine
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ernest J. Gaines
Jack Gilbert
Nadine Gordimer
Stephen Jay Gould
Thich Nhat Hahn
Bill Higginson
bell hooks
Karen Hubert (Allison)
Halvard Johnson
Ursula LeGuin
Elmore Leonard
Doris Lessing
George Lies
Lee Maynard
Cormac McCarthy
Irene McKinney
Daniel Menaker
Kate Millet
Toni Morrison
Alice Munro
Andre Norton
Tillie Olsen
Sondra Spatt Olsen
Grace Paley
Naomi Replansky
J.D. Salinger
John Sanford
Jose Saramago
Oliver Sacks
Andrew Sarris
Andre Schiffrin
Pete Seeger
George Schneeman
Ntozake Shange
William Styron
Sue Townsend
Kurt Vonnegut
Rachel Wetzsteon
C.D. Wright
Vera Williams
Howard Zinn
William Zinsser
George Lies
George was one of the great gentlemen of West Virginia Letters. Learn more about him here.
Alice Munro, Nobel Prize Winning
Master of the Short Story Dies
See the New York Times obituary here.
Literary Hub has links to 25 Alice Munro
stories to read online for free.
Paul Auster
Eva Kollisch Dies October 2023
Eva Kollisch, memoirist, teacher, and Progressive and LGBQT activist Died this week. Her memoir with Hamilton Stone Editions is The Ground Under My Feet
See the obituary in the The New York Times here.
Naomi Replansky Great Working Class
& Feminist Poet died January 7. 2023.(See Obituary in The New York Times)
Cormac McCarthy died 6-13-23
See the NYTimes obituary here.
Thich Nhat Hahn died in January 2022--Zen master, Vietnamese peace activist, writer, and great soul. One of many obituaries is in The New York Times. Photo above left is of him with Dr. King in 1966. The second photo is of him in later years.
Suzy McKee Charnas, feminist science fiction, y.a.
and vampire novelist, died in January 2023.
Joan Didion died in December 2021. See her obituary in the New York Times.
Trailblazing cultural theorist, activist, public intellecutal, teacher and feminist writer bell hooks died in December 2021. See her obituary in The Guardian.
Daniel Menaker died October 26, 2020. Here's a link to his obituary at The New Yorker where he worked for a quarter of a century. He was a personal friend of my husband, Andy Weinberger up in the Berkshires where Dan's uncles Enge (short for Engels) and Pete ran socialist-inspired camps for grown-ups and boys.
Diane di Prima died 10-25-20
Ernest J. Gaines died November 5, 2019.
Toni Morrison Has Died....
(link to New York Times obituary)
Chuck Kinder has died--see his obituary here.
Edith Konecky 1922--2019
Edith Konecky, a member of my writing group and author of many wonderful novels and stories, died on March 28, 2019. Read more about her here. See some of her books here.
My longtime writers' group colleague Carol Emshwiller died on February 2, 2019 at the age of 97. She was a magnificent avant garde and science fiction writer, and I can at any moment summon up her inimitable voice reading from her work. Our group used to say, "But, Carol, is that science fiction, or is it avant garde?" And she could never understand why we couldn't distinguish one form the other.
But both of her chosen forms were wonderful and unlike anything else I've ever read. Ursula Le Guin said that she had “one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.”
Here's a lovely obituary from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. Here's another from Locus.
This final week of October, 2018, two wonderful playwrights died:
Playwright Maria Irene Fornes has died: such beautiful plays, and she was another Teachers & Writers artist, too.
Ntozake Shange. She was a couple of years behind me at Barnard Colled, although I didn't know her.
Ursula LeGuin
Halvard Johnson
Lee Maynard, the author of Crum
Tom Hayden He joined the sit-ins
I participated in at Columbia University in 1968.
Vera Williams, working class children's writer and artist has died. Lovely obituaries in The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly
That great soul Oliver Sacks, physician and writer, died 8-30-15.
Ntozake Shange, playwright and poet
I was at Barnard with her but didn't know her; Died 10-27-18
William Zinsser died in early May, 2015: “There’s not much to be
said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soonenough.”
See the New York Times obituary.
Phillip Levine died on Valentine's Day 2015.
October 24, 2014 was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of poet John Berryman: Here's one of his Dreamsongs.
Nadine Gordimer Has Died:
NY Times Obituary 7-14-14
Gabriel Garcia Marquez died April 17, 2014
Sue Townsend, author of the
Adrian Mole books died 4-10-14
Andre Schiffrin, founder of the New Press died.
Sondra Spatt Olsen, who died in September 2013, was the author of Lauren's Line and Traps as well as dozens of short stories in literary journals. She taught English at Queens College for 25 years.
Elmore Leonard, Genre Novelist, Died This Summer
Author of everything from Get Shorty to Three Ten to Yuma
Don't miss his funny rules of writing-- sample: "Using adverbs is a mortal sin..."
Irene McKinney, Poet Laureate of West Virginia,
Until her death in 2012
Gail Adams, Irene, MSW at a party at WV Wesleyan in 2006 or so.
Chinua Achebe (1930 -2013)
Obituary from The New York Times
Jo Carson, Tennessee
writer and filmmaker
Jose Saramago, Portuguese Nobelist,
Communist, Surrealist and All-Around Wonderful Writer
There's an obituary of George Schneeman the artist in the New York Times . He did the cover art for two of my books, Personal Fiction Writing and Blazing Pencils.
Bill Higginson, poet and haiku guru died on October 11, 2008. See obituary and one of his websites. There are several obituaries on various blogs if you Google his name. I didn't know him well, but he was an important member of the New Jersey literary community for many years, and a teacher with the New Jersey Writers project. Lovely man, contributed to my newsletter a few months ago, just because I asked.
Tillie Olsen , a great working class voice
Grace Paley
A life of literature and anti-war activism.
See her obituary.Read an excellent piece by Suzanne McConnell
on Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher.
George Eliot
"But this imperfectly-taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her -- now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the foresaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and spouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an early Methodist."
-- from Middlemarch, Chapter 74– near end
Howard Zinn
See Shelley Ettinger's comments on Zinn at Workers World.
Howard Zinn wrote in his memoir You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Boston, Beacon Press: 1994, p. 208) :
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.Also, see Zinn's piece "Finishing School for Pickets."
Rosa Luxemburg
" Stereotyped terms like "reactionary" or "progressive" still mean little in art. Dostoevsky, especially in his later writings, is an avowed reactionary, a canting mystic and hater of socialists. His portraits of Russian revolutionaries are malicious caricatures. Tolstoy's mystic teachings at least only play around with reactionary tendencies. And yet the works of both these writers have a rousing, edifying, and liberating effect on us. The conclusion is: it is not that their starting-point is reactionary; it is not that social hate, narrow-mindedness, caste-conscious egoism, and adherence to the existing order dominate their thoughts and feelings; but rather the contrary: they are motivated by a boundless love of humanity and a deep-seated feeling of responsibility for social injustice....Indeed, for a true artist the social medicine that he prescribes is of secondary importance: it is the source of his art, its animating spirit, not the aim which he consciously sets for himself, which is of paramount importance.
– Rosa Luxemburg, introduction to Wladimir Korolenki
Zora Neale Hurston
"She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell. Been set for still bait. When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine."
-- From Their Eyes Were Watching God
Jorge Luis Borges
"He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly spooned sugar into it, tasted it (a pleasure that had been forbidden him in the clinic), and thought, while he stroked the cat's black fur, that this contact was illusory, that he and the cat were
separated as though by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant."
-- from "The South"
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