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In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them.
With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fiction as well as poetry and comic books. He was also a lawyer, a supervisor of a juvenile prison, and an advocate for abused children, sitting near President Bill Clinton in 1993 when he signed the National Child Protection Act into law. It established a national registry of convicted child abusers and was widely known as “the Oprah Bill” because Vachss had advocated for it on Oprah Winfrey’s television show. She sat beside Vachss at the White House signing ceremony.
Vachss (pronounced “vax”), who lost the sight in his right eye from a childhood accident, died of coronary artery disease on Nov. 23, 2021 at 79, but his death was not widely reported until months later. He published 18 hard-boiled crime novels featuring an antihero named Burke, an ex-con and unlicensed private investigator who doesn’t always play nice as he pursues people who prey on children. Vachss, unlike Burke, was not a victim of sexual abuse as a child, but, like Burke, he had a black-and-white view of such predators, including Westley Allan Dodd, who was executed by hanging in 1993 after he was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering three young boys. “Some predatory sociopaths can be deterred,” Vachss wrote at the time. “None can be rehabilitated…. What makes sexual predators so intractable and dangerous is that, as Mr. Dodd candidly acknowledged, they like what they do and intend to keep doing it.”
Burke had an equally uncompromising view of such monsters, and he treated them accordingly. Vachss explained his antihero’s unnerving rough edges this way: “I wanted to show people what hell looked like, and I didn’t think an angel would be the right guide.”
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Though never a household name, Bruce Duffy drew rapturous critical praise for his 1987 debut novel, The World as I Found It, a fictional biography of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Duffy was unfazed when the dense and challenging book failed to catch on with readers. “You know,” he said at the time, “you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write. You’re not like a cow that can give ice cream with one udder and milk with another. So I said, ‘Screw it!’ I don’t care what anybody thinks.”
Duffy, who died from complications of brain cancer on Feb. 10 at 70, produced just two more novels—an autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy who flees his home in the Maryland suburbs after his mother’s death, and a reimagining of the life of the scabrous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. All the while Duffy worked day jobs as a security guard, corporate consultant and speechwriter. Though The World as I Found It was reissued as a classic by NYRB in 2010, Duffy couldn’t find a literary agent willing to shop his fourth novel. Once again he said “Screw it!” and started writing a new book. He was working on it at the time of his death.
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Duvall Hecht never wrote a book. Yet Hecht, who died of heart failure on Feb. 10 at 91, brought books to untold millions of avid listeners. Bored with listening to the radio during his long commutes on L.A. freeways in the 1970s, Hecht and his first wife, Sigrid, started a business in their living room called Books on Tape, which gave birth to today’s $1.3 billion audiobooks industry. The Hechts’ formula was simple: pay unknown actors to read every single word of books in the public domain, then sell or rent the cassettes through the mail to individuals, schools and libraries.
It worked, but it wasn’t Hecht’s whole story. In his long and colorful life, he served in the Marines, won a gold medal as a member of the United States rowing team at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, coached college rowing teams, worked as a commercial pilot and in marketing for an investment banking firm. After the Books on Tape catalog reached 6,000 titles, Hecht sold the business to Random House for $20 million, then took one last career turn. He lived out a boyhood dream and spent seven years driving 18-wheelers. He loved the life of of a long-haul trucker: it was perfect for listening to audiobooks.
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Twenty years before he dragged the United States into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara was crunching ordnance numbers for the U.S. military’s fire-bombing of Japanese cities, a campaign designed to break the nation’s spirit hasten the end of the Second World War. McNamara calculated the necessary number of planes for the bombing runs, the miles of flight, the gallons of fuel, the amount of jellied gasoline. When the campaign failed to accomplish its purpose, President Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Katsumoto Saotome, who died of pneumonia on May 10 at 90, was one of the survivors of the fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, which incinerated an estimated 100,000 people in a single day, most of them civilians. Saotome, a novelist, spent more than half a century amassing the memories of his fellow survivors, which eventually filled six volumes. The first, published in 1971, was modeled on John Hersey’s famous account of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
The bombing of civilians has largely been a failure as war strategy. It failed during the Blitz in London, it failed during the bombing of German cities—the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s blistering novel Slaughterhouse Five—and it appears to be failing today in Ukraine. After watching news footage of Ukrainian women and children trying to escape Russian artillery attacks, Saotome said he was reminded of scenes in Tokyo nearly 80 years earlier: “I feel like I am seeing scenes of many Japanese people wandering around trying to escape just in front of my eyes.”
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Nancy Milford was a two-hit wonder, the author of best-selling biographies of two of the most incandescent women of the Jazz Age: Zelda Fitzgerald and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. While researching Zelda (1970) and Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), Milford’s dogged research was aided by strokes of dazzling good luck. Her research for Zelda included letters, albums, scrapbooks, interviews with friends of her subject and her subject’s husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as reports by psychiatrists who treated Zelda for schizophrenia. The luck came when Zelda’s daughter, Scottie, handed her mother’s papers to Milford in shopping bags—a trove no one else had seen. For Savage Beauty, the luck sprang from a visit to the upstate New York home of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma. The house was stuffed with thousands of Edna’s notebooks, letters and drafts of poems that no one else had seen, treasure the biographer pored over for four summers.
Milford, who died of an unspecified cause on March 29 at 84, spent more than three decades working on the second of her two hits. In those years she spent countless hours teaching, bombing around the Berkshire Mountains in an antique Morgan sports car, and helping found the Leon Levy Center for Biography in Manhattan. Milford made no apologies for the long lull between books. “Pish posh,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s my life, and I can do with it what I want.”
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With his hyphenated name, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith staked a claim to the territory of the Rio Grande Valley, a slice of borderland between two cultures that he called Belken County. This imaginary county’s imaginary county seat was Klail City, which was surrounded by the towns of Flora, San Pedro, Ruffing and Jonesville-on-the-Rio. Readers and critics invariably linked this self-contained universe to the extraordinary Yoknapatawpha and Macondo, and even to above-average Lake Wobegone.
Hinojosa-Smith, who wrote in English and Spanish (and taught himself German), was best known for his 15-volume Klail City Death Trip series, but he also wrote short stories and essays, freely mixing in poetry, sketches, letters, police procedurals, autofiction, border noir, fragments of dialog and monolog. Time got chopped up. Narratives rarely moved straight ahead. They teemed with, as Hinojosa-Smith put it, “the fair and the mean, the fools and knaves, the heroes and cowards, those who are selfish, and those who are full of self-abnegation.” Like the people and the world it tries to capture, there is nothing conventional about the writing. And there was nothing conventional about the writer.
Hinojosa-Smith, who died from complications of dementia on April 19 at 93, served in the U.S. Army, worked in a chemical plant, taught high school and worked as a civil servant before turning to fiction. After he made his name as a writer, he taught literature at the University of Texas for 35 years. Writing in Texas Monthly, the novelist Richard Z. Santos summed up what Hinojosa-Smith did for the residents of Belken County and every other borderland in the world. “The people are no longer mutants or outcasts but hybrids and the future of both society and literature,” Santos wrote. They are also, he added, “something new and beautiful.”
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In 2018, Duncan Hannah published a first-person account of the 1970s downtown New York art and punk rock scene, 20th Century Boy: Notebooks on the Seventies. Partying at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, hanging with the Warhol crowd, appearing in underground movies with Debbie Harry, drinking and drugging and fucking heroically, Hannah seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody. Few of them knew that the young man from Minneapolis had artistic dreams backed by a trust fund, and few would have predicted that he would sober up and have a respectable late career as a painter of realistic pictures that he described as “a love letter to art history.” My own review of 20th Century Boy ended with a premonition of this unlikely second act for Hannah, who died of heart attack on June 11 at 69. “(The book) ends almost sweetly,” I wrote, “with Hannah’s stubbornly conventional paintings winning him a solo gallery show, where he arrives sober, gets treated like a prince, and actually sells a bunch of pictures. Hannah has come to realize that the coolest thing of all is the courage to do what’s uncool. It’s a grace note of an ending to a long grubby harrowing wallow. Somehow, it feels perfect.”
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Melissa Bank was a textbook “overnight” success. She spent 12 years polishing her first batch for short stories, writing on weekends and at night after working a day job as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Then, when the collection’s title story was published in the literary magazine Zoetrope, the book world woke up. A bidding war ensued. When it was over, Bank was handed a $275,000 advance from Viking for her first book, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which became a New York Times bestseller, got translated into dozens of languages, sold 1.5 million copies and, for better and mostly worse, got tarred with the brush of “chick lit.”
The book follows Jane Rosenal as she moves from her teen years to her mid-thirties, navigating the shoals of sex, love, money and death. The voice is controlled and knowing—“like John Cheever, only funnier,” in the opinion of one critic. There are grace notes sprinkled throughout the stories, as when Jane escorts her older brother’s older girlfriend into the bedroom they’ll be sharing at the family’s beach house. The room is furnished with a pair of bunk beds. The girlfriend, a Manhattan sophisticate named Julia Cathcart, surveys the setup: “A bunk,” she said, as though charmed. “Like camp.”
Bank followed her debut with a second collection of linked stories, The Wonder Spot, in 2005. Though it did not sell nearly as well as Girls’ Guide, critics were unanimous in declaring it the better book. Bank was at work on a third book when she died from lung cancer on Aug. 2 at 61, an overnight success gone too soon.
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The death of Barbara Ehrenreich, from breast cancer on Sept. 1 at 81, was a loss for every overworked, underpaid, unappreciated person struggling to survive in America—and for every clear-eyed person who sees through the rosy myths of the American dream. Ehrenreich eviscerated those myths most surgically in her 2001 best-seller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. To research the book, Ehrenreich, who held a doctorate in cellular immunology, took on a string of minimum-wage jobs— waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide, Walmart associate—while living in trailer parks and cheap hotels. Though the book, like all of her writing, was fuelled by rage over the worsening inequality of life in America, her goal was less to vent than to give voice to the legions of invisible people working at the bottom of the ladder. In a career that produced more than 20 books, she also took on the pharmaceutical industry, the failure of America’s health care system, poverty, student protests, women’s rights, even the danger of the peculiarly American fixation with “positive thinking.” It was a career that pointed to a chilling conclusion. As Ehrenreich put it: “We turn out to be so vulnerable in the United States.”
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Mike Davis was a seer, a writer who explored the hollow heart of the American Dream, Southern-California style. In 1990, shortly after the publication of his best-known book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Davis said: “What we’re going to find out in short order is that for tens of thousands of people, there’s only one rung of the ladder. There’s no place to climb up.” That year, as crack cocaine coursed through L.A., an average of three people died every day from gun violence.
Two years after the book’s publication, Los Angeles exploded with rioting in the wake of the acquittal of four white policemen who were captured on video beating a Black man named Rodney King. Davis was instantly anointed a prophet for his prescient insights into the city’s social fissures. In a 2006 reissue of the book, he dismissed such plaudits: “Every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming.” He added this dry assessment: “City of Quartz, in a nutshell, is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.” The city, he added a bit more poetically, “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.”
He followed his breakout success with Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster in 1998, which excoriated the heedless, market-driven urbanization of the desert. “As a result,” Davis wrote, “Southern California has reaped flood, fire and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.” Disaster, as he predicted, is now at hand. Seven states, including California, are currently at war over rights to the Colorado River, which is at its lowest level ever thanks to climate change and the region’s insatiable thirst for water.
Davis, who died of esophageal cancer on Oct. 25 at 79, grew up in a blue-collar family and spent his early years protesting the Vietnam War and working as a meat cutter and a truck driver. The former job got him a union scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles, which he entered at the age of 28, and the latter introduced him to off-the-radar pockets of Los Angeles County, which would provide the source material for his later writings. Despite all the dark foreboding in his books, Davis remained an optimist to the end. “Utopia is available to us,” he said in 2020. “You can never discard hope.”
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When they were in eighth grade, 14-year-old Lloyd Newman and his buddy LeAlan Jones tape-recorded 100 hours of interviews with friends, family and neighbors in the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago, an oral history they called “Ghetto Life 101.” It caught the ear of a National Public Radio producer named David Isay, who boiled it down into a 28-minute segment for NPR in 1993.
Three years later, the two friends produced an oral collage, “Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse,” that explored the horrific killing of a 5-year-old boy who was dropped from the window of a vacant fourteenth-floor apartment by two children, aged 10 and 11. Eric’s crime? He refused to steal candy for his killers. The collage made Newman and Jones the youngest winners in the history of the prestigious Peabody Award. A year later, the collage was adapted into a book, Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago, co-written with Isay. After the book appeared, Newman gave a succinct summery of death and life in an American ghetto: “People get thrown out of windows, drowned, stabbed, shot. But a lot of that killing would stop if the government would make it livable around here. We don’t have no parks. The swings are broken. There’s nothing for people to do. There’s no fun. Life isn’t worth living without some fun.”
Newman died on Dec. 7 from complications of sickle cell anemia. He was 43.
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And here, in alphabetical order, are a few of the more towering literary figures we lost this year:
Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. (86) was a product of generations of New England wealth. That wealth—its sources and manners, its mores and foibles—became the topic of his best-known work, Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America, a knowing, clear-eyed dissection of the upper classes that won deserved comparisons to The Education of Henry Adams.
Baseball was more than a game to Roger Angell (101). It was an obsession and a metaphor and a source of joy. He was both an elegant reporter and a shameless fan. In his 1977 book Five Seasons, he tried to explain what drives the sports fan: “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”
Jason Epstein (93) was an oxymoron—a hard-nosed businessman with a soft spot for fine literature. As an editor he helped shape the writings of a stable or thoroughbreds that included Gore Vidal, Jean Strouse, W.H. Auden, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, among many others. As a businessman he saw the market for quality paperbacks, and he helped give birth to the New York Review of Books during a bruising newspaper strike in 1963. It’s still going strong today.
After it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller (83) caught Hollywood’s attention. The story about the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for his killer was a breakthrough because it moved beyond idealized or demonized types and served up flawed, three-dimensional characters, both Black and white. The movie version, retitled A Soldier’s Story, had a cast that included Denzel Washington from the original off-Broadway cast. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and one for Fuller’s adapted screenplay. Despite this pedigree, the play did not make it to Broadway until 2020, when it won the Tony Award for best revival. It’s too late to ask Fuller: Is vindication sweeter after such a long wait?
In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, Richard Howard (92) translated the works of dozens of French writers into English, among them Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On a different note, he also translated Charles de Gaulle’s war memoirs.
Herbert Janklow (91)and Sterling Lord (102) were two giants among literary agents. The former was known for his longevity and for making his clients rich, including Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Nancy Reagan and Pope John Paul II; the latter was known for his longevity and for making his clients famous, including Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Doris Kearns Goodwin and, counter-intuitively, Robert McNamara. “This is a business of self-fulfilling prophecies,” Janklow declared. “One of the reasons to drive for big advances is not to make authors and agents rich. It’s to make the publisher aware of what he’s bought.”
Her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—won two Booker Prizes and an adoring worldwide readership for Hilary Mantel (70). She said she decided to reimagine the inner life of Cromwell, one of the most trusted aides of King Henry VIII, because everything she’d read made him out to be a stereotyped villain. “I realized,” she said two years before her death, “that some imaginative work was due on this man.”
It’s unthinkable that an American writer could inspire the critical acclaim and public adulation that were showered on the Spanish writer Javier Marías (70). His novels drew freely on spy thrillers and murder mysteries, and he turned this material into literature with intricate plots and a rambling, discursive style. He also wrote a popular newspaper column, translated the work of British and American writers into Spanish, and sold some eight million copies of his 14 novels, four books of short-stories and dozens of essay collections worldwide. In his decorated life, Marias was regularly mentioned as a favorite to win of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the one award that eluded him.
There didn’t seem to be a subject too big for the capacious talents of David McCullough (89). He wrote fluid best-sellers about disaster (the Johnstown flood), marvels of engineering and human will (the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal), presidents (John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman), and about the momentous year of 1776. “I think of writing history as an art form,” McCullough said in an interview for an HBO documentary. “And I’m striving to write a book that might—might—qualify as literature. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader. Moves me.”
As an art critic at The Village Voice and later The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl (80) wrote out of deep knowledge or art and an even deeper love for artists and their creations. His criticism could cut, but it always came out of that love. He was also a published poet, and he said that writing poetry taught him the art of “tracking truth by ear.” Late in life he became the subject of Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, a memoir by his daughter, Ada Calhoun. “I compulsively reread it,” Schjeldahl wrote to Calhoun shortly before he died, “deeply joyful.”
