Nelson DeMille, a beloved and prolific author whose propulsive thrillers featuring terrorist hijackings, Russian spy schools, gruesome murders, Mafia kingpins, wartime crimes and military malfeasance made him a publishing juggernaut, died on Tuesday in Mineola, N.Y. Read more
Tag: American Authors
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
Chattanooga Hosts Third Annual James Baldwin Festival of Words
The 3rd annual James Baldwin Festival of Words celebrates black excellence in the literary arts with a full slate of events. The festivities kick off on Friday, August 2nd at 4:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chattanooga Public Library Downtown and is free to the public. Read more
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Does America Still Care About Authors?
Once upon a time, writers were celebrities; now, the role of the public intellectual has gone up in smoke. For one novelist, a glamorous trip to France showed what literary life back home could be like. Read more
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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
The Essential Don DeLillo
His fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here’s where to start. Read more
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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
The Essential Joan Didion
Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma. Read more
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John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93
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
