rolling dead writer obit thread

for recently deceased writers who may have been forgotten/near-forgotten/little-known/got lost in the shuffle or who just deserve a belated shout-out. i'll start!

Charles Wright, Novelist, Dies at 76

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: October 8, 2008

Charles Wright, who wrote three autobiographical novels about black street life in New York City between 1963 and 1973 that seemed to herald the rise of an important literary talent but who vanished into alcoholism and despair and never published another book, died on Oct. 1 in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in the East Village.

The cause was heart failure, said Jan Hodenfield, one of Mr. Wright’s former editors; earlier in the year, he said, Mr. Wright had learned that alcohol had eroded his liver. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, Mr. Wright lived in the spare room of the Brooklyn apartment of Mr. Hodenfield and his family.

Mr. Wright’s three books were “The Messenger” (1963), “The Wig” (1966) and “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” (1973), all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Together they describe a loner’s life on the fringes of New York society, his protagonists stand-ins for himself, working at low-level jobs, living in low-rent apartments, hanging out with lowlife personalities.

“The Messenger” was the best received of the three, perhaps because it told a more universal tale about being an outsider.

“The Wig” is a far angrier effort. “Malevolent, bitter, glittering,” the critic Conrad Knickerbocker wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Wright’s style was “as mean and vicious a weapon as a rusty hacksaw,” and that he wielded it against blacks as well as whites. The book is an occasionally surreal, comic portrait of a black man, Lester Jefferson, who feels he must hide his blackness to achieve the acceptance and material rewards he thinks he deserves.

“Absolutely Nothing,” most of which had been previously published in columns that Mr. Wright wrote for The Village Voice, is a chronicle of seedy adventures — as a dishwasher and porter, as a lover, as a drunk — that some critics questioned as self-hating, though others found it evocative and disturbing. The three books were republished in a single volume by HarperCollins in 1993.

Charles Stevenson Wright was born June 4, 1932, in New Franklin, Mo. His mother died when he was 4, and his father, a railroad porter, sent him to live with his maternal grandmother. When he was 14, they moved to another central Missouri town, Sedalia.

By that age, Charles was an avid reader and knew he wished to be a writer; he dropped out of high school and spent his days in the library, and according to one story he told the Hodenfield family, he would read magazines in their bound stacks at the railroad station because he knew that once they got to the local drugstore, he wouldn’t be allowed in to look at them.

At 17, having read about the Handy Writers’ Colony in Marshall, Ill., newly founded by the novelist James Jones and others, he went there.

Mr. Wright served in the Army during the Korean War and moved to New York in his 20s. An early novel was rejected by Farrar, Straus, but an editor there encouraged him to write his own story, which became “The Messenger.” Over the next decade, his profligate habits — he told one interviewer his hobbies were smoking and drinking — seized hold of him. Mr. Hodenfield, who in the late 1960s was working at GQ Scene, a magazine for teenage boys, assigned him to write an article about Motown.

“He was a very strange man, and after we met I thought, ‘Well, this is not going to work,’ ” Mr. Hodenfield said. “Then he turned in the most perfect manuscript I’d ever received.”

The two men became friends, and when Mr. Hodenfield saw Mr. Wright, then 44, spiraling into oblivion, he offered him a room in his home. Mr. Wright leaves no survivors.

“He came to stay for a few weeks in 1976,” Mr. Hodenfield said. “And he stayed until just before he turned 64. He was a second father to both my children.”

i think the musician of the same name is still alive, actually.

i know. how crazy would it be if they were the same dude, though?

missed this one. r.i.p.

Critic John Leonard dies at age 69

By HILLEL ITALIE – 3 days ago

NEW YORK (AP) — Literary and cultural critic John Leonard, an early champion of Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many other authors, and so consumed and informed by books that Kurt Vonnegut once praised him as "the smartest man who ever lived," died Wednesday night at age 69.

His stepdaughter, Jen Nessel, said he died at the Mount Sinai Hospital from complications from lung cancer.

A former union activist and community organizer, Leonard was an emphatic liberal whose career began in the 1960s at the conservative National Review and continued at countless other publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly. He was also a TV critic for New York magazine, a columnist for Newsday and a commentator for "CBS Sunday Morning."

Leonard had the critic's most fortunate knack of being ahead of his time. He was the first major reviewer to assess Morrison's fiction and the first major American critic to write about Marquez. As the literary director for radio station KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., Leonard featured the commentary of Pauline Kael, before she became famous as a film critic for The New Yorker. Leonard was also an early advocate of Mary Gordon, Maxine Hong Kingston and other women writers.

His good work was appreciated. When Morrison traveled to Stockholm in 1993 to collect her Nobel Prize, she brought Leonard along, "one of the most incredible experiences of his life," Leonard's stepdaughter said. Studs Terkel, who died Oct. 31, once called him "a literary critic in the noblest sense of the word, where you didn't determine whether a book was `good or bad' but wrote with a point of view of how you should read the book."

Said Leonard's good friend, Kurt Vonnegut: "When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while simply looking for the men's room, blundered into a lecture by the smartest man who ever lived."

Leonard treated his subjects like lovers — to be protected, assailed, embraced. Literature was sweet madness. In 2007, accepting an honorary prize from his peers at the National Book Critics Circle, Leonard observed that "for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace.

"At an average of five books a week ... I will read 13,000. Then I'm dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every MONTH in this country."

Leonard's own books included "Black Conceit," "This Pen for Hire" and "Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures."

Raised by a single mother, Leonard was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Washington, New York City and Long Beach, Calif. He dropped out of Harvard University, then attended the University of California at Berkeley and was taken on by William F. Buckley at the National Review, where other young talent included Garry Wills and Joan Didion.

"At one point, his job was monitoring the left-wing press," Leonard's stepdaughter said with a laugh.

Although gravely ill near the end, Leonard did make sure to vote Tuesday, for Barack Obama, needing a chair as he waited at his polling place on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

"That was very important to him," Nessel said.

Leonard is survived by his second wife, Sue Leonard; two children; one stepchild; and three grandchildren. A public memorial is planned for February.

http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2002/02/26/image502149x.jpg

some john leonard book reviews here:

http://www.nybooks.com/authors/38

Hortense Calisher, Author, Dies at 97

By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE
Published: January 15, 2009

Hortense Calisher, the novelist and short-story writer whose unpredictable turns of phrase, intellectually challenging fictional situations and complex plots captivated and puzzled readers for a half-century, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 97 and lived in Manhattan.

The death was confirmed by her granddaughter Mimosa Spencer.

“Among contemporary writers of distinction Hortense Calisher has always been a strangely elusive presence,” Joyce Carol Oates observed in The New York Times, reviewing Miss Calisher’s novel “Mysteries of Motion” in 1983. “So radically do her novels differ from one another (the spareness of ‘Standard Dreaming,’ for instance, set beside the baroque complexities of ‘The New Yorkers’), it has been impossible to assign her to the sort of ready-made category that literary journalism seems too often to insist upon.”

Failure and isolation were themes that ran through her 23 novels and short-story collections: failure of love, marriage, communication, identity. She explored the isolation within families that cannot be avoided yet cannot be faced, isolation imposed by wounds inflicted even in the happiest of households, wounds that shape events for generations.

But her peers seemed most intrigued by her distinctive way of telling a story, her filigreed sentences and bold stylistic excursions. “Hortense Calisher has never been a writer who masked her thinking self or disappeared into her subject,” the critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The Times, commenting on her Jamesian fascination with the authorial intellect.

Miss Calisher was born on Dec. 20, 1911, in Manhattan, the setting for much of her fiction, to Joseph Henry Calisher, a manufacturer, and Hedvig Lichtstern.

When she was 7 she began keeping notebooks, which later were invaluable to her as a repository of the childhood memories that found their way into her fiction and the three books that traced her personal and family history: “Herself” (1972), “Kissing Cousins” (1988) and “Tattoo for a Slave” (2004).After graduating from Hunter College High School, she entered Barnard College in 1929, majoring in English composition. After graduation she worked as a sales clerk, a model and social worker. In 1935 she married Heaton Bennet Heffelfinger, an engineer, then had two children and moved to Nyack, N.Y., where for years she wrote poetry, but published nothing.

“It was a lack of self-confidence,” she recalled in a 1972 interview in The Times. “I’d been fed on the best of literature, and I wanted to reach the summit. I had the history of many intellectual women — and men — who get to college and then have to cope with a living, with a marriage, with children. I got to be quite sick, since I wasn’t doing what I was fitted for and craved.” She added: “Though I was a candidate for psychiatry, I always felt I had to fight it out alone, on the battlefield of myself. Finally I had something that was so important to me that I had to say it.”

While enrolled in a writing course in Nyack, she turned out a series of semi-autobiographical stories about a family she called Elkin. The New Yorker published five of them, and her career was begun.

Her first book, a collection of short stories titled “In the Absence of Angels,” appeared in 1951, followed by her first novel, “False Entry,” in 1961. The novel, which took the form of a journal kept by man who used his extraordinary memory to invade the lives of others, attracted wide attention. Critics were intrigued by its unexpected shifts in time, place and point of view. Granville Hicks, in Saturday Review, said, “The style, at least at first, seems rather mannered, and indeed it is involved and allusive, but the further one goes, the more one recognizes how beautifully it suits her purpose.”

Miss Calisher and her husband divorced in 1958. In 1959 she married the writer Curtis Harnack, who survives her, as well as a son from her first marriage, Peter Heffelfinger of Anacortes, Wash., and three grandchildren.

“Textures of Life” (1963), a minute exploration of family relationships, and “Journal From Ellipsia” (1965), a science-fiction comedy “of otherworldly manners,” as one critic put it, also found favor with the critics, as did two novellas published in 1966, “The Railway Police” and “The Last Trolley Ride.” In this period she also published two more story collections, “Tale for the Mirror” (1962) and “Extreme Magic” (1964). But her highly ambitious fourth novel, “The New Yorkers” (1969), was criticized as being overly detailed, rambling and without shape or form.

Throughout her career as a novelist, opinion tended to split evenly among critics who found her prose style and approach to narrative better suited to short stories. “Hortense Calisher is a creator of voices, moods, states of mind, but not of worlds,” Robert Kiely wrote in a review of her novel “Standard Dreaming” for The Times. Other critics were mesmerized by her idiosyncratic language and imaginative daring.

Although a slow, painstaking writer, she continued to produce novels with almost metronomic regularity, notably “Queenie” (1971), “Eagle Eye” (1973), “On Keeping Woman” (1977), “The Bobby-Soxer” (1986), “Age” (1987) and “The Small Bang” (1992). Her collected short stories were published in 1975, and “Saratoga, Hot,” yet another story collection, appeared in 1985.

In her 80s she produced an ambitious novel, “In the Palace of the Movie King” (1993), about a filmmaker in communist Albania whose wife covertly arranges to have him smuggled to the United States without his consent, and “In the Slammer With Carol Smith” (1997), about a former ’60s radical who wanders the streets of Manhattan, homeless and bewildered.

Still writing in her 90s, Miss Calisher published her last novel, “Sunday Jews” (2002). In addition to producing a large body of written work, she also lectured on literature and taught creative writing at several colleges and universities in America and in Japan, the Philippines and Thailand. Miss Calisher was president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from 1987 to 1990 and president of PEN in 1986 and 1987.

“Going back over one’s own work, one can see from earliest times, certain paraforms emerging,” she wrote in “Herself.” “If one is crazy, these are idées fixes; if one is sane, these are systematic views. A mind is not given but makes itself, out of whatever is at hand and sticking tape — and is not a private possession but an offering. I had always had to write everything, no matter the subject, as if my life depended upon it. Of course — it does.”

totally makes me want to seek out her books. i know i've seen her books around in thrift stores, etc, but i've never picked one up.

W.D. Snodgrass, 83, a Poet of Intensely Autobiographical Themes, Is Dead

By WILLIAM McDONALD
Published: January 15, 2009

W. D. Snodgrass, who found the stuff of poetry in the raw material of his emotional life and from it helped forge a bold, self-analytical poetic style in postwar America, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his debut book, died on Tuesday at his home in Erieville, N.Y., in rural Madison County. He was 83.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Kathleen Snodgrass, said.

“Your name’s absurd,” Mr. Snodgrass wrote in an early poem, “These Trees Stand...,” as if at once to silence the snickering and skewer himself. But only a few lines later he sang out his name, declaring, “Snodgrass is walking through the universe,” as if to announce the sort of poetic journey of the self he had undertaken.

It found immediate expression in “Heart’s Needle,” a collection he published at the age of 33 in 1959. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, startled American poetry circles and prompted a letter of praise from Robert Lowell.

Lowell, who had taught Mr. Snodgrass in a poetry workshop at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), had at first admonished his student about his early poems. “He said, ‘You’ve got a brain; you can’t write this kind of tear-jerking stuff,’ ” Mr. Snodgrass recalled in an interview with The New York Times at his home in October.

“But I came to a point where I had to rebel against my teachers, including Lowell,” he said. “I wanted to use a much more simple and direct kind of language, something that would be common without feeling worn out or used.”

Lowell changed his mind, persuaded Knopf to publish “Heart’s Needle” and called it a “breakthrough for modern poetry.”

At its center is the title poem, a 10-part plainspoken sequence about the loss of his young daughter, Cynthia, through his first divorce. He began composing the lines on the back of a concert program and finished most of the rest while working nights as a hospital orderly.

In formal, tightly controlled, rhyming stanzas addressed to his daughter, the poem’s tone is loving but rueful, often self-critical and anguished, as in these lines:

Winter again and it is snowing;

Although you are still three,

You are already growing

Strange to me.

“Snodgrass has built a moving poem out of something we treat far too casually: early divorce, in which it is the love between children and their parents that receives the deepest wounds,” the critic M. L. Rosenthal wrote in an influential essay in The Nation.

Mr. Rosenthal labeled the style “confessional,” recognizing a new school of poetry in which he grouped Mr. Snodgrass with Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz and Anne Sexton, who was at one point a student of Mr. Snodgrass’s.

Some critics deplored the “confessional” mode, saying it gave license to excessive self-exposure and risked sentimentality. James Dickey called Mr. Snodgrass’s work “sniveling, self-serving.” But others were enthusiastic. Hayden Carruth called Mr. Snodgrass “by far the best poet to have appeared so far in this decade and probably one of the best of any age now practicing in America.”

Mr. Snodgrass disliked the “confessional” label, fearing his work would be taken as a form of therapy. And as the style began to fall out of favor in the ’60s, he widened his range in his follow-up book, “After Experience” (1967), and many others, commenting on religion, politics and society and finding inspiration in Impressionist paintings, the natural world and even the last days of Hitler.

In all he wrote more than 30 books of poetry, criticism and translations and taught at a number of American colleges for more than 40 years. Tall, bearded and robust, he could be blunt in his advice to students. “If you can be happy doing something else, do it,” he said of poetry-writing in one interview, adding: “Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded. But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.”

William DeWitt Snodgrass — De (pronounced dee) to his friends — was born in Jan. 5, 1926, and grew up in Beaver Falls, Pa., the son of an accountant, Bruce, and a homemaker, Helen; Mr. Snodgrass long held her partly responsible for the death of an asthmatic sister, Barbara, at the age of 24.

After serving as a Navy typist in the Pacific during World War II and abandoning dreams of becoming a playwright, he enrolled in the Iowa workshop alongside aspiring poets like Donald Justice, William Dickey and Philip Levine. His teachers at Iowa and other workshops, besides Lowell, included some of the major poetic voices of the era, among them John Crowe Ransom, Karl Shapiro, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell.

With bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Iowa, he also began a long academic career, taking university teaching posts at Cornell, Rochester, Wayne State, Old Dominion, Syracuse and Delaware, from which he retired in 1994.

His most controversial work was “The Fuehrer Bunker” (1977), a heavily researched sequence of verse monologues in the voices of Nazi figures like Joseph Goebbels and Eva Braun, chronicling their last days in their Berlin bomb shelter.

To Mr. Snodgrass, it was an attempt to delve, poetically, into the minds of historical figures responsible for the most heinous event of the 20th century. But the work, though praised by Harold Bloom and others for its power and originality, came under attack. Some critics said the enormity of the subject overwhelmed the artistry and violated the poetic aesthetic. Mr. Snodgrass was accused of humanizing monsters.

Still, he adapted the work for the stage at the American Place Theater in Manhattan in 1981. The production, short-lived, drew weak reviews.

In later years he created book-length collaborations with the artist DeLoss McGraw in which poems and paintings comment on one another. In 2006 he published a well-received second volume of new and selected poems, “Not for Specialists.”

Mr. Snodgrass, who lived in the same house in Erieville for 40 years, was married four times, the first three marriages ending in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Kathleen Brown, his survivors include his daughter, Cynthia Snodgrass of Vernon, Conn; a son, Russell, of Albuquerque, N.M.; a sister, Shirley Schiemer of Beaver Falls, and a brother, Richard, of Pittsburgh.

For all the unblinking honesty he had brought to his autobiographical poems, Mr. Snodgrass chose not to write about illness in his last months. “Everybody has said everything that can be said about it,” he told The Times. Besides, he said, he had no regrets: “I’ve didn’t have to write anything according to anybody’s dictates or desires other than my own.”

But as a younger man he did write about death, in “Old Apple Trees,” hearing in the “whispering” of branches the voices of elders commiserating about their last days. The poem concludes:

Not one of us got it his own way.

Nothing like any of us

Will be seen again, forever.

Each of us held some noble shape in mind.

It seemed better that we kept alive.

I read the hell outta Heart's Needle back in some fondly-remembered haunting-the-poetry-section-of-the-Pomona-Public-Library days. He's one of the last of a generation of somewhat-lionized poets - after his generation, the whole scene fragemented & turned inward & diminished somewhat & became more specialized - not "one of the last good poets," there are always going to be plenty of those, but one of the last from the days when poetry got reviewed more often than it does now. Many from that generation died young, relatively so at any rate - good to think of one of them who made it into old age.

Jack Gilbert (still alive) came from that same era -- won the Yale Younger Poets award in the early 60s, had a big spread in Life magazine. And then he turned away from all that, didn't publish for a few decades, and now in his 80s is publishing some amazing poems. There are a few audio links on this linked page that are amazing. Also, there's an interview with him in the current American Poetry Review where he says something I like a lot:

"My heart, for instance, was partially made by Frank Sinatra and the movies I went to when I was growing up. My heart was shaped by stories, by pictures, by songs. I believe we are made by art, art that matters. Not what's ingenious, clever, or hard to read. Not a mystery puzzle. I think if a poem doesn't put emotional pressure on me, I don't feel comfortable in the sense of feeling more than I can feel, understanding more than I can understand, loving more than I am able to be in love. Real poetry enables me for that. I think it's about putting pressure on me. If it doesn't put pressure on the reader, what's it for?"

John Mortimer, Barrister and Writer Who Created Rumpole, Dies at 85

By HELEN T. VERONGOS
Published: January 17, 2009

John Mortimer, barrister, author, playwright and creator of Horace Rumpole, the cunning defender of the British criminal classes, died on Friday at his home in Oxfordshire, England. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by his agent, Katherine Vile, who said he had been ill for some time.

Mr. Mortimer is known best in this country for creating the Rumpole character, an endearing and enduring relic of the British legal system who became a television hero of the courtroom comedy.

But as a barrister in Britain, Mr. Mortimer came to be known in the 1960s as a defender of free speech and human rights for taking up cases that he said were “alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance.” He became a Queen’s Counsel just in time to tackle some of the civil rights cases that arose in Britain in that decade, all the while writing fiction, nonfiction, drama and comedy.

To read Rumpole, or to watch the episodes of the popular television series “Rumpole of the Bailey,” is to enter not only Rumpole’s stuffy flat or crowded legal chambers but also to feel the itch of his yellowing court wig and the flapping of his disheveled, cigar-ash-dusted courtroom gown.

Rumpole spends his days quoting Keats and his nights quaffing claret at Pommeroy’s wine bar, putting off the time that he must return to his wife, Hilda, more commonly known as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Using his wit and low-comedy distractions, Rumpole sees that justice is done, more often than not by outsmarting the “old sweethearts” and “old darlings” of the bench and revealing the inner good — or at least the integrity and inconsistency — of the accused, including clans like the Timsons, whose crimes have kept generations of police officers busy.

Rumpole began as a BBC teleplay in 1975. The television series was produced in Britain by ITV, beginning in 1978. Once one has seen Leo McKern in the role, it is difficult to read the Rumpole stories without hearing his rich narration.

There is a certain predictability to the Rumpole stories. Mr. Mortimerhimself acknowledged in a 2006 interview with the The Guardian newspaper that Rumpole had not “developed” in more than 30 years of stories, television scripts and novels. “What keeps him going is that he can comment on whatever’s going on at the time,” he said.

Mr. Mortimer continued to churn out the Rumpole adventures for many years. In “Rumpole and the Reign of Terror” (2006), Rumpole defends a suspect being held under Britain’s antiterrorism laws, giving Mr. Mortimer the opportunity to attack the broad-brush laws that he believed imperiled human rights.

He also adapted Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” for television, years after he became enthralled with the book as a young man. Somehow, despite the demands of his chosen careers — a “schizoid business of being a writer who had barristering as a day job,” he said — Mr. Mortimer also found time to pursue his lifelong interest in women, write for newspapers and keep up the garden nurtured by his father, Clifford Mortimer, whose outsize shadow remained with him all his life.

The elder Mr. Mortimer, who was known for his anger and harsh tongue, was a barrister who specialized in divorce petitions and wills. He lost his sight when John was a boy, but the blindness was never discussed or acknowledged, and the father carried on much as he had before. His wife would accompany him to court on the train, reading his legal briefs aloud en route so that he could keep up on his cases while often treating fellow commuters to detailed accusations of marital infractions.

Mr. Mortimer brought his father and their relationship to the stage in “A Voyage Round My Father,” which was eventually produced as a television movie in 1981, filmed at the family home, Turville Heath Cottage, near Henley on Thames, where the younger Mr. Mortimer grew up. Laurence Olivier played Clifford Mortimer, re-enacting his death in the same bed where the father died.

Sir John eventually took over his father’s law practice. After trying his hand at novels, writing in the morning before court, he turned to radio scripts and had his first success in 1957 with “The Dock Brief,” broadcast by BBC radio. It was produced onstage years later.

His memoirs, including “Clinging to the Wreckage” (1982) and “Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life” (1994), drop dozens of names of the theater and movie people he spent time with. There are trays upon trays of cocktails in his stories, and in later years interviewers often noted the presence of what one described as a “comfortably large Guinness that he is drinking for his health, even though it is still a long time until lunch.”

John Clifford Mortimer was born on April 21, 1923, in London to Clifford and Kathleen May Smith Mortimer. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1949 he married Penelope Fletcher, a writer, who came to the marriage with three children. They had two children, Sally and Jeremy, and divorced. He later married Penelope Gollop, or “Penny the Second,” as he has referred to her. Their children are Rosamond and Emily.

A heretofore-unknown son, Ross Bentley, born of a liaison with Wendy Craig, an actress, surfaced when Mr. Mortimer was in his 70s, and the author proclaimed himself delighted to welcome the son and new grandchildren to the family.

The existence of Ross Bentley came out in “The Devil’s Advocate,” an unauthorized biography by Graham Lord (2005), which asserted that Mr. Mortimer had known about the son all along. He denied this.

An authorized biography, “A Voyage Round John Mortimer” (Viking), by Valerie Grove, was published in 2007.

As a defender of free speech, Sir John championed the punk rock group the Sex Pistols, who released an album that was initially held to have an obscene title, as well as “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” by Hubert Selby Jr., a novel deemed unacceptable under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.

He also appeared on behalf of the London edition of Oz magazine, which had produced a “school kids” edition written and illustrated by student readers. Among other items that offended the censors, the magazine depicted the head of the children’s character Rupert Bear grafted atop a body drawn by Robert Crumb, showing Rupert in a state of sexual excitement.

“Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.”

In addition, he went to Nigeria to help in the defense of the playwright and poet Wole Soyinka on a criminal charge.

In recent years, despite poor health, Mr. Mortimer was a fixture at London parties and social gatherings. He also maintained an active writing schedule, frequently contributing opinion articles to London newspapers.

In “Murderers and Other Friends,” one of his memoirs, Mr. Mortimer recounted an interview for a radio program in which the questioner handed him the script of his own obituary, suggesting it might be “great fun” if he read it aloud for listeners. He refused. But he devoted a great deal of thought to death and dying.

He wrote about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child’s-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests.

“Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls,” he wrote in “The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully” (2000). “The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn’t ready to appear ridiculous.”

I'm glad somebody posted about Snodgrass. I only read Heart's Needle a few years ago; certainly he was the least taught member of the so-called confessional school. The casual, chiseled elegance of his verse is a million miles from James Merrill, and a lot warmer than Berryman and Lowell's. Anyway, RIP, and I checked out the Selected Poems from the library yesterday afternoon.

RIP Christine Brooke-Rose.

Someone I've always meant to read, but never have. Waggish reading Xorandor was the most recent reminder that I should.

Kermode on Brooke-Rose

Yeah I always saw the odd bk about - got the notion she ws a bit post-Ann Quin, etc. but never picked anything up.

Sad to say I wasn't aware of her, but that Kermode review makes me want to put that right in the near future.

i was looking at the zbc just the other day. i should get into her, i guess

i have read some of the ZBC now i've looked at the cover. it seemed unlikely that i hadn't.

Not a writer, but RIP Valerie Eliot.

Oh, here's the Telegraph obit.