Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-styled underdog who transformed the publishing industry by building Barnes & Noble into the country’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83. Read more
Category: Obituaries
Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s Editor and Piercing Columnist, Dies at 89
Lewis H. Lapham, the scholarly patrician who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life, died on Tuesday in Rome. Read more
Edna O’Brien, Writer Who Gave Voice to Women’s Passions, Dies at 93
Edna O’Brien, the prolific Irish author whose evocative and explicit stories of loves lost earned her a literary reputation that matched the darkly complex lives of her tragic heroines, died on Saturday. Read more
Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89
Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. Read more
Ismail Kadare, Whose Novels Brought Albania’s Plight to the World, Dies at 88
Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly wrote his isolated Balkan homeland onto the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized the country’s totalitarian state, died in Tirana, Albania, on Monday. Read more
Kinky Friedman, Musician and Humorist Who Slew Sacred Cows, Dies at 79
He and his band, the Texas Jewboys, won acclaim for their satirical takes on American culture. He later wrote detective novels and ran for governor of Texas. Read more
Caleb Carr, Author of Dark Histories, Dies at 68
Caleb Carr, a military historian and author whose experience of childhood abuse drove him to explore the roots of violence — most famously in his 1994 best seller, “The Alienist,” a period thriller about the hunt for a serial killer in 19th-century Manhattan — died on Thursday at his home in Cherry Plains, N.Y. Read more
Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92
Alice Munro, the revered Canadian author who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to churning out psychologically dense stories that dazzled the literary world and earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Monday night at her home in Ontario. Read more
Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. Read more
C.J. Sansom, Best-Selling Author of Historical Mysteries, Dies at 71
C.J. Sansom, who transported millions of readers to 16th-century England with his erudite, psychologically complex mystery novels about Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer turned investigator navigating political intrigue during the Tudor era, died April 27 at a hospice center near his longtime home in Brighton, England. Read more
