Looking back on 2014, we lost some giants of literature. (Chapeau: The New York Times). The world of letters — no, the world — will be vastly poorer without Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpieces were rooted in Latin America but universal in reach, or Nadine Gordimer, a white South African who wielded fiction to lay bare the all-too-real sins of apartheid. Both were Nobel laureates, and if prizes are a yardstick of literary achievement, then they were joined in death by a veritable legion of the laureled. Among them were the poets Galway Kinnell, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Maxine Kumin and Mark Strand; the short-story writer Mavis Gallant; the novelists Peter Matthiessen, Thomas Berger and P. D. James, the English queen of mysteries; and the historian James MacGregor Burns. We also lost some lesser known writers, publishers, and editors, many of whom were both veterans and writers. Remember songwriter Pete Seeger, journalist and author George C. Wilson, memoirist Charles Champlin, journalist and editor Lester Bernstein, memoirist and history writer Raleigh Trevelyan, and screenwriter and novelist Wynn Chamberlain. RIP all.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 17:56:26 +0000
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