R. I. P. -- The Authors Thread

On this day in 2001, Hitch-hiker's Guide author Douglass Adams died.

 

April 11, 2007. Kurt Vonnegut jnr. The guy who kept me going in the 60' & 70's.

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Ray Bradbury just died.

 

I liked Ray a lot. He was the introduction for a lot of people into the world of Scifi.
"Something Wicked This Way Comes"

RIP Ray.

 

RIP



Donald J. Sobol, Creator of Encyclopedia Brown, Dies at 87 - N.Y. Times

 

Gore Vidal Dies at 86

His memoir, Palimpsest, and his essays are well worth reading. I never made it through any of his historical novels like Burr or Lincoln, but his first novel, The City and the Pillar holds its own with any novel about WWII, and it was also one of the first American novels to openly address gay themes. And his made-for-TV political drama The Best Man is well worth watching, in the unlikely event you can track it down on DVD.

 

Maeve Binchey RIP

 

I missed this one: Historian John Keegan, author of The Face of Battle and Many Other Books, died

The Face of Battle is a landmark study of three battles, Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, told not just from the perspective of the generals and the strategists, but as much as possible from the men who did the fighting. He also wrote on the American Civil War, the invasion of Normandy, and in 2004, the Iraq war. Haven't read those, but The Face of Battle is really good.

He has his flaws, and the linked NYT obit pretty much hits all of them. But he wrote really readable history, which is always admirable.

 

Years ago I took a college course based on this book & that was how I was introduced to Keegan. A History of Warfare is superior also.

 

Damn. Another one snuck by me. Last monday, journalist, art critic, historian, and Aussie Robert Hughes died.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...e-critic-and-powerful-voice-now-silenced.html

His books on art (a couple of them based on excellent PBS series) were fantastic, as were his books about Australia, Barcelona, and Rome. Damn fine memoir in there, too. And unmentioned on the "best book" link in the article is The Culture of Complaint, a bipartisan critique of the whininess that has become endemic in American cultural and political discourse.

From the article:

Ten years earlier, reviewing a well-meaning Goya show in Boston that attempted to turn the master into an exemplary liberal, Hughes gently demurred, arguing correctly that the painter was as much pulled by the demons of the pueblo as committed to exorcising them in the name of a Spanish Enlightenment.​

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He ended the piece with a statement of the kind of bleak truth he always refused to duck. “The liberal message was that . . . Man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Goya’s message late in life is different. The chains are attached to something deep inside human nature: they are forged from the substance of what, since Freud, we have called the id. They are not the “mind-forged manacles” of which William Blake wrote: they are not a social artifact that can be legislated away or struck off by the liberating intellect, they are what we are. In the end there is only the violated emptiness of acceptance of our fallen nature; the pining of the philosophical dog whose master is as absent from him as God is from Goya.”​

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Another author dies when I would've guessed had already died.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/a...holar-dies-at-104.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=all


http://www.theatlantic.com/national...butor-and-renaissance-man-dies-at-104/264185/

Jacques Barzun dies at 104.

 

Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart and many other novels, dies at 82

If things had worked out a little differently, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe’s first book could have been lost to history. A London typing service “dismissed the handwritten manuscript—sent from Africa—as a joke,” notes the Wall Street Journal. Little did they know it was the book that would be seen as the foundation stone for African literature. When it was finally published in 1958, the book became a huge hit, propelling the Nigerian author to an unlikely fame and going on to selling 10 million copies in 50 languages.

"It literally invented African literature," says Simon Gikandi, Kenyan author of Reading Chinua Achebe. The 82-year-old Nigerian, who had been living in the United States since a 1990 car accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, died Friday morning following a brief illness, his agent told the Associated Press.​

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Salinger's manuscripts, where are you?

 

Iain Banks announces he has terminal cancer and a few months to live.

Says his people are trying to get his last book finished and out before he goes

 

(cross posted from Ghoul Pool)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Novelist and Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 85

 

SF Pulp Master Jack Vance Dies at 96

In 2009, a profile in the New York Times Magazine described Vance as "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices," according to the website.

Vance collected a number of awards over the years, including Hugo Awards for The Dragon Masters in 1963, The Last Castle in 1967, and for his memoir This is Me, Jack Vance! in 2010.

 

Crime Writer (and former western author) Elmore Leonard dies at 87

Leonard was said to be in the middle of his 46th novel when he was admitted to the hospital. This past November he was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution from the National Book Foundation. He began publishing novels and short stories in the early 1950s and kept at it until the end. His most well-known works of fiction were probably: Get Shorty, which was turned later turned into a film with the same name starring John Travolta and Danny DeVito; Rum Punch, which became the basis for Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown; and Out of Sight, which would become a Steven Soderbergh movie starring George Clooney.
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Seamus Heaney. Damn. What a huge loss this is.

 

Not my favorite contemporary poet, but his bog people poems, and his translations of Beowulf and the lesser known (and shorter) Testament of Cresseid are monumental, IMO.

 

Tom Clancy passed away.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tom-clancy-dead-celebrated-thriller-141800682.html