Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Read more
Category: Obituaries
Vernor Vinge Has Died at Age 79
As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for the novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer’s File 770 blog notes, Vinge’s novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of “cyberspace.”
Vinge first coined the term “singularity” as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics. When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, “When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” Read more
Frans de Waal, Who Found the Origins of Morality in Apes, Dies at 75
Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful case that apes think, feel, strategize, pass down culture and act on moral sentiments — and that humans are not quite as special as many of us like to think — died on Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. Read more
British Novelist Christopher Priest Has Died
Acclaimed novelist best known for The Prestige whose large body of work never fitted into any particular literary mould. Read more
N. Scott Momaday, First Native American to Win Pulitzer Prize, Dies at 89
N. Scott Momaday, an author, literature professor and member of the Kiowa Indian tribe who became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize — for his 1968 debut novel, “House Made of Dawn” — and helped inspire a flowering of contemporary Native American literature, died Jan. 24 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Read more
John Nichols, Literary Chronicler of Small-Town New Mexico, Dies at 83
John Nichols, who launched his literary career in his mid-20s with a pair of tragicomic novels but became best known for evoking New Mexico’s small towns and rural landscapes in books including “The Milagro Beanfield War,” was found dead Nov. 27 at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 83. Read more
AS Byatt, Author and Critic, Dies Aged 87
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, who wrote under the name AS Byatt, authored complex and critically acclaimed novels, including the Booker prize-winning Possession and her examination of artistic creation, The Children’s Book. Over her career, she won a swathe of literary awards, from the Booker to a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. Read more
Louise Glück, Nobel-Winning Poet Who Explored Trauma and Loss, Dies at 80
Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80. Read more
Milan Kundera, Czech Literary Star and Communist Party Outcast, Dies at 94
The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” he was known for sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in his native Czechoslovakia. Read more
Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Read more
