Obituaries

Newbery Medal winner Jean Craighead George has passed away. She was ninety-two-years-old.

George (pictured, via) enjoyed a career in children’s book publishing that spanned more than six decades. She won the Newbery for Julie of the Wolves in 1973. Next year, Penguin Young Readers Group will posthumously publish The Eagles are Back (the final installment of a picture book trilogy) and Ice Whale (a young adult novel written in collaboration with her son, Craig George).

Here’s more from her biography: “In the 1940s she was a reporter for The Washington Post and a member of the White House Press Corps. After her children were born she returned to her love of nature and brought owls, robins, mink, sea gulls, tarantulas – 173 wild animals into their home and backyard. These became characters in her books and, although always free to go, they would stay with the family until the sun changed their behavior and they migrated or went off to seek partners of their own kind.”

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Novelist Carlos Fuentes has passed away. Mexican president Felipe Calderon shared the sad news on Twitter.

The great author had won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize and the Latin Literary Prize. In July, Dalkey Archive Press will publish his novel, Vlad. They also published his books Terra Nostra, Where the Air Is Clear, and Distant Relations. Here is an excerpt from his novel, Inez:

“We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death.”

For a long time this sentence had been going around and around in the aged maestro’s head. He did not dare write it down. He was afraid that consigning it to paper would make it real, with fateful consequences. He would have nothing more to say after that: the dead man does not know what death is, but neither do the living. For that reason the sentence that haunted him like a verbal ghost was both sufficient and insufficient. It said everything, but at the price of never saying anything again.

(Image via)

Writing about the death of Maurice Sendak, the New York Times reported that My Brother’s Book will be posthumously published next February: “a poem written and illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother, Jack.”

The brothers forged an early partnership as writers. Jack Sendak died in 1995 and published six kid’s books (including Circus Girl and The Happy Rain with illustrations by Maurice). His HarperCollins biography explored their relationship:

Jack Sendak was born in 1924 in Brooklyn, New York. He began writing at a very early age, working with his brother, Maurice, writing and illustrating their own story books. Sendak often credited his father for his love of books, citing inspiration from nightly bedtime reading. Reviewers have called Jack Sendak’s books humorous, magical, and mysterious. Having served in the US Army during World War II, Jack Sendak went on to work for Emerson Radio and Television, as well as the US Postal Service.

Maurice Sendak has passed away, leaving behind a lifetime of beloved children’s books, including Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There.

This GalleyCat editor will never forget reading Where the Wild Things Are to his daughter for the first time. Months before she could speak, she could growl like the dreamy monsters lurking in that book. Sendak’s poem and picture book about his late brother, My Brother’s Book, will be published in February.

Here’s more from the New York Times: “A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.” Read more

Novelist Harry Crews has passed away. Above, we’ve embedded a YouTube video of the author talking to Dennis Miller about his time in the military, his E.E. Cummings-inspired tattoo and his Scar Lover novel.

He wrote many novels, including The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes, but he also produced an extensive body of nonfiction work. You can explore the novelist’s prolific career at the Henry Crews Bibliography. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Vice Magazine about his work as a writing teacher:

“Well, thank God the University of Florida gave me this deal that every writer needs. I worked with 10 or 12 graduate students a year. They were just young people who thought they wanted to be fiction writers. By and large, they fell in love with the idea of being a fiction writer and then they were introduced to the slave labor of it and they pretty soon decided, “No, I don’t want to do this.” … If you’re going to write a book, you don’t know what you’re looking at. You have to disabuse them of all these ideas they have that they are sure are right but which are almost exclusively, always, all of them, wrong.

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National Book Award-winning poet Adrienne Rich has passed away. She was 82 years old. Follow this Poetry Foundation link to read poems by the great author.

Over her long career, Rich (pictured, via Robert Giard) earned the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur genius grant. Maud Newton pointed us toward Rich’s poem, “For the Dead.” An excerpt:

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

Conservative author Andrew Breitbart has died. The news first broke on his website this morning: “Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles.”

He was the author of Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! and Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon — The Case Against Celebrity. His website obituary included part of a new conclusion he wrote for Righteous Indignation.

Here’s an excerpt: “I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies. Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night.”

Jan Berenstain, one half of the couple that created The Berenstain Bears book series, passed away this weekend.

The series began in 1963 with The Big Honey Hunt. This GalleyCat editor grew up reading the series and now loves reading Bears in the Night with his daughter. What is your favorite Berenstain Bears book?

In a Scholastic interview, Berenstain shared the story of how she created the series with her husband Stan Berenstain. Both are pictured above…

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The great publisher Barney Rosset has passed away. Rosset bought Grove Press in the 1950s, championing the work of countless writers, including: Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Pablo Neruda, Kenzaburo Oe, Kathy Acker, and David Mamet.

In the 1960s, he launched the provocative magazine, Evergreen Review. In a highly recommended interview at The Paris Review, Rosset shared his first encounter with Miller’s work as a college freshman at Swarthmore:

I read Tropic of Cancer, which I bought at Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street. Who told me about it, I don’t know, but I liked it enormously and I wrote my freshman English paper about both it and The Air Conditioned Nightmare … After I read Tropic of Cancer, I left—decided to go to Mexico. Because the book had influenced me so much, I left in the middle of the term. But I ran out of money. I never got to Mexico; I got as far as Florida and I came back. Four weeks had gone by. They had reported me missing to the United States government. My family didn’t know where I was. I came back, sort of sadly.

(Via Sarah Weinman)

Journalist, former New York Daily News editor and journalism professor Richard Blood passed away this weekend.

For twenty years, Blood (pictured, via) taught journalism students at New York University and Columbia University School of Journalism. This GalleyCat editor only spent one semester with Blood, but left his class with a lifetime of writing advice.

Students and friends can add tributes on this Facebook memorial. The Daily Plan-it has a collection of links to more online tributes to the great teacher.

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