EUGENE O’NEILL

October 16, 1888–November 27, 1953

BOSTON—Eugene O’Neill, the noted American playwright whose prolific talents had brought to him both Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, died today of bronchial pneumonia.

Mr. O’Neill, who was 65, had been ill for several years with Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. O’Neill, who died in a Boston apartment where he had been living recently, is survived by his third wife, Carlotta Monterey; a son, Shane, and a daughter, Oona O’Neill, the wife of the actor Charlie Chaplin.

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was generally regarded as the foremost American playwright, his achievements in the theater overwhelming those of his ablest contemporaries. He came upon the scene at an opportune moment and remained active long after the American theater had come of age.

In the words of Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, Mr. O’Neill shook up the drama as well as audiences and helped transform the theater into an art seriously related to life. The genius of Mr. O’Neill lay in raw boldness, in the elemental strength of his attack upon outworn concepts of destiny.

The playwright received the Pulitzer Prize on three occasions and was the second American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The author of 38 plays, most of them grim dramas in which murder, disease, suicide and insanity are recurring themes, Mr. O’Neill was in recent years too wracked by illness to write. He lived in a house by the sea with his third wife, a former actress.

But his plays continued to be produced to acclaim here and abroad, and the fall of 1951 saw a O’Neill “revival” on Broadway. The American National Theatre and Academy scheduled his “Desire Under the Elms” to launch its new season. The New York City Theatre Company played “Anna Christie” as the second offering of its winter season.

A revival of “Ah, Wilderness!,” the playwright’s nostalgic comedy of first love, found its way to the television screen.

No modern playwright except the late George Bernard Shaw had been more widely produced than Mr. O’Neill. He was as well known in Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Calcutta as in New York.

There was as much color and excitement in his early life as there was in his plays. Indeed, much of his success was attributable to the fact that he had lived in and seen the very world from which he drew his dramatic material.

As a young man he spent his days as a sailor and his nights in dives that lined the water’s edge. Out of these experiences came such plays as “The Hairy Ape,” “Anna Christie” and “Beyond the Horizon,” all of which have had a lasting life in the theater.

Mr. O’Neill was born on Oct. 16, 1888, in the Barrett House, a family hotel at 43rd Street and Broadway. His father was James O’Neill, who starred for so many years in “The Count of Monte Cristo.” His mother was the former Ellen Quinlan. The first seven years of Eugene’s life were spent trouping around the country with his parents.

On his eighth birthday he was enrolled in a Roman Catholic boarding school on the Hudson. In 1902, when he was 13, he entered Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn., then considered one of the leading boys’ schools in New England.

He was graduated in 1906 and went to Princeton. After 10 months at the university, he was expelled for heaving a brick through a window of the local stationmaster’s house. It marked the end of his formal education.

Shortly thereafter he went to Honduras with a young mining engineer, and the two spent several months exploring the country’s jungles and tried their hand at prospecting for gold. The venture ended after Mr. O’Neill became ill with fever and was shipped home.

For a time the young man worked as an assistant stage manager for his father, who was touring in a play called “The White Sister.” But he soon succumbed to the lure of far-off places and shipped as an ordinary seaman on a Norwegian freighter bound for Buenos Aires. This began his acquaintance with the forecastle that would stand him in good dramatic stead later on.

After Buenos Aires, he shipped again, this time for Portuguese East Africa. From there he sailed back to Buenos Aires, then worked his way to New York on an American ship.

In New York he lived at a waterfront dive known as Jimmy the Priest’s, and acquired the locale for “Anna Christie.” In August, 1912, he went to work as a reporter on The New London Telegraph in Connecticut. His newspaper career lasted for four months because, as he admitted, he was more interested in writing verse and swimming than in gathering news.

Just before Christmas in 1912 he developed tuberculosis and was sent to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium at Wallingford, Conn., where he spent five months.

At Gaylord he began to read [August] Strindberg. “It was reading his plays,” Mr. O’Neill later recalled, “that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theater myself.”

After his discharge from the sanitarium he boarded with a family in New London for 15 months. During this period he wrote 11 one-act plays and two long ones. He tore up all but six of the one-acters. His father paid to have five of the six short plays printed in a volume called “Thirst,” published in 1914.

The elder O’Neill also paid a year’s tuition for his son at Prof. George Baker’s famous playwriting course at Harvard. Afterwards, Mr. O’Neill returned to New York and settled in a Greenwich Village rooming house, where he proceeded to soak up more “local color” at various Village dives, among them a saloon known as The Working Girls’ Home.

Mr. O’Neill lived in the Village until 1916, when he moved to Provincetown, Mass., and fell in with a group conducting a summer theatrical stock company known as the Wharf Theatre. He hauled out a sizable collection of unproduced and unpublished plays, one of which, a one-acter called “Bound East for Cardiff,” was put into rehearsal. It marked Mr. O’Neill’s debut as a dramatist.

At summer’s end the Wharf Theatre set up shop in New York and called itself the Provincetown Players, a name that was to become famous. The company produced more of Mr. O’Neill’s plays, and the budding playwright began to be talked about in theatrical circles farther afield. About the same time, three of his one-act plays, “The Long Voyage Home,” “Ile” and “The Moon of the Carribbees,” were published in the magazine Smart Set.

In 1918 Mr. O’Neill went to Cape Cod to live, occupying a former Coast Guard station on a lonely spit of land three miles from Provincetown. He started working on longer plays and, in 1920, had his first big year when he won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes for “Beyond the Horizon.” The play marked Mr. O’Neill’s first appearance on Broadway. The other prize winners were “Anna Christie” in 1922 and “Strange Interlude” in 1928.

“Beyond the Horizon” established Mr. O’Neill as both a ranking playwright and a moneymaker. The play ran for 111 performances and grossed $117,071.

The Theatre Guild began producing his plays with “Marco Millions” in 1927 and staged all his plays thereafter. At least three of the plays, “Mourning Becomes Electra,” “Strange Interlude” and “The Iceman Cometh,” marked a new departure—they ran from four to five hours in length.

Mr. O’Neill’s dramas ranged from simple realism to the most abstruse symbolism, but one play—”Ah, Wilderness!”—was more in the tradition of straight entertainment and interspersed with sentiment. The play ran for 289 performances.

Mr. O’Neill did not always meet with approval. At times he was the object of bitter denunciation, especially from persons who believed his works smacked of immorality. By his choice of themes he several times stirred up storms that swept his plays into the courts.

“All God’s Chillun Got Wings” was fought by New York authorities on the ground that it might lead to race riots. “Desire Under the Elms” was almost closed in the face of mounting protests. It never did open in Boston. The play was permitted to go on in Los Angeles, but after a few performances the police arrested everybody in the cast.

“The Hairy Ape,” which starred Louis Wolheim in the role of Yank, a powerful, primitive stoker, was one of the dramatist’s most popular works. The play ran for 10 weeks, went on the road for a long tour and later was popular abroad.

Many critics felt that “Mourning Becomes Electra,” which opened on Oct. 26, 1931, and had 14 acts, was Mr. O’Neill’s masterpiece. Mr. Atkinson called it “heroically thought out and magnificently wrought in style and structure.” Joseph Wood Krutch observed that “it may turn out to be the only permanent contribution yet made by the 20th century to dramatic literature.”

After “Days Without End” was produced in 1934, a play that lasted only 57 performances, Mr. O’Neill was not represented on Broadway until 1946, when “The Iceman Cometh” was staged.

In 1936, he won the Nobel Prize but could not go to Stockholm to receive it because of an appendicitis operation.

In a letter to the prize committee, Mr. O’Neill said: “This highest of distinctions is all the more grateful to me because I feel so deeply that it is not only my work which is being honored but the work of all my colleagues in America—that the Nobel Prize is a symbol of the coming of age of the American theatre.”

After “The Iceman Cometh,” Mr. O’Neill wrote a play called “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” which will not be produced until 25 years after his death. He had shown the manuscript to a few friends, and it was reported that the play deals with his own family life.

Mr. O’Neill was stricken with Parkinson’s disease about 1947. The disease caused his hands to jerk convulsively, making it impossible for him to write in longhand.

In 1909 the dramatist married the former Kathleen Jenkins, who bore him a son, Eugene O’Neill Jr. The son committed suicide on Sept. 25, 1950. The marriage ended in divorce in 1912, and six years later, Mr. O’Neill married the former Agnes Boulton. They were divorced in 1929. Shane and Oona were born to this marriage. Mr. O’Neill married Miss Monterey on July 22, 1929.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961

KETCHUM, Idaho—Ernest Hemingway was found dead of a shotgun wound in the head at his home here today. His wife, Mary, said that he had killed himself accidentally while cleaning the weapon.

Mr. Hemingway, whose writings won him a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer Prize, would have been 62 years old July 21.

Frank Hewitt, the Blaine County Sheriff, said after a preliminary investigation that the death “looks like an accident,” adding, “There is no evidence of foul play.”

The body of the bearded, barrel-chested writer, clad in a robe and pajamas, was found by his wife in their modern concrete house in this village on the outskirts of Sun Valley. A double-barreled, 12-gauge shotgun lay beside him with one chamber discharged.

Mrs. Hemingway, the author’s fourth wife, was at the time of the shooting the only other person in the house and was asleep in a bedroom upstairs. The shot woke her and she went downstairs to find her husband’s body near a gun rack in the foyer. Mrs. Hemingway told friends that she had been unable to find any note.

Mr. Hemingway was an ardent hunter and an expert on firearms. His father, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, who was also devoted to hunting, shot himself to death in 1928 at the age of 57, despondent over a diabetic condition. The theme of a father’s suicide cropped up frequently in Mr. Hemingway’s short stories and at least one novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

As an adult, he sought out danger. He was wounded by mortar shells in Italy in World War I and narrowly escaped death in the Spanish Civil War when three shells plunged into his hotel room. In World War II, he was injured in a taxi accident. He nearly died of blood poisoning on one African safari, and he and his wife walked away from an airplane crash in 1954 on another big-game hunt.

The author, who owned two estates in Cuba and a home in Key West, Fla., started coming to Ketchum 20 years ago. His house sits on a hillside near the banks of the Wood River.

Mr. Hemingway achieved worldwide fame and influence as a writer by a combination of great emotional power and a highly individual style that could be parodied but never successfully imitated. His lean and sinewy prose; his mastery of a laconic, understated dialogue; his insistent use of repetition, often of a single word, built up and transmitted an inner excitement to countless of his readers. In his best work, the effect was accumulative; it was as if the creative voltage increased as the pages turned.

Not all readers agreed on Mr. Hemingway, and his “best” single work will be the subject of literary debate for generations. But possibly “The Old Man and the Sea,” published in 1952, had the essence of the uncluttered force that drove his other stories. In it, man is a victim of, and yet rises above, the elemental harshness of nature.

The short novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it unquestionably moved the judges who awarded Mr. Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year. A great deal of Mr. Hemingway’s work showed a preoccupation, frequently called an obsession, with violence and death. He loved guns, he was one of the great aficionados of the deadly bullfight, and he identified with the adventures of partisan warfare.

He wrote a great deal of hunting, fishing, and prizefighting, with directness, vigor, and the accuracy of a man who has handled the artifacts of a sport. He was at times a hard liver and a hard drinker, but he was also a hard and constant worker.

Mr. Hemingway’s fascination with the calibers of cartridges and physical conflict in general brought a barb from the writer Max Eastman in 1937. “Come out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “We all know you.”

Mainly by trial and error, Mr. Hemingway had taught himself to write limpid English prose. Of his apprentice days as a writer in Paris, he wrote:

“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.”

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, on July 21, 1899, the second of six children. His father was a physician who was more devoted to hunting and fishing than to his practice and gave the boy a fishing rod when he was 3 and a shotgun when he was 10. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a religious-minded woman who sang in the choir of the First Congregational Church.

With his graduation from Oak Park High, Mr. Hemingway completed his formal education. He read widely, however, and had a natural facility for languages.

World War I was underway, and Mr. Hemingway managed to get to Italy, where he wangled his way into the fighting as a Red Cross ambulance driver with the Italian Army. He learned all about the great Italian rout at Caporetto, which he described brilliantly in “A Farewell to Arms,” published in 1929.

On July 8, 1918, while he was passing out candy to frontline troops at Fossalta di Piave, Mr. Hemingway was wounded in the leg by an Austrian mortar shell and hospitalized for many weeks. He eventually drifted to the expatriate Left Bank world of Paris and was soon one of the writers who frequented Shakespeare & Co., the bookstore of Sylvia Beach. Here he met, among many others, André Gide and James Joyce.

It was in Paris that Mr. Hemingway began to write seriously. He wrote with discernment about the persons around him, his expatriate countrymen, together with the “Lost Generation” British and European post-war strays, and he limned them with deadly precision.

Before he was established as a writer, Mr. Hemingway underwent the privations that were almost standard for young men of letters in Paris. He lived in a tiny room and often subsisted on a few cents’ worth of fried potatoes a day. With the publication in 1926 of “The Sun Also Rises” after three years of indifferent response to his work, he achieved sudden fame.

In 1928, Mr. Hemingway returned to the United States, where he lived for the next 10 years, mostly in Florida. He was still only 30 when he published his highly successful “A Farewell to Arms.”

“Death in the Afternoon” was published in 1932, and the book’s great success established its author as one of the great popularizers of bullfighting.

For several years Mr. Hemingway hunted big game in Africa and did much shooting and fishing in different parts of the world. “Winner Take Nothing” was published in 1933 and “The Green Hills of Africa” in 1935. The latter was one of the best contemporary accounts of the complex relationships between the hunter, the hunted and the African natives who are essential to the ritual of their confrontation.

Like many American intellectuals, Mr. Hemingway offered some degree of support to left-wing movements during the Nineteen Thirties. In “To Have and Have Not” (1937), one critic thought he had sounded “vaguely Socialist,” although more readers will remember the work as a tale of action and tragedy in the Florida Keys, the love affair between the doomed boatman and his slatternly wife.

In 1936, Mr. Hemingway went to Spain and covered the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. In 1940 his novel of the Spanish Civil War, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” showed that his own deepest sympathies were with the Loyalists.

The year World War II broke out, Mr. Hemingway took up residence in Cuba. But soon he was back in action in Europe, resuming the combat correspondence he had begun in Spain. He was with the first of the Allied armed forces to enter Paris, where, as he put it, he “liberated the Ritz” Hotel. Later he was with the Fourth United States Infantry Division in an assault in the Hurtgen Forest, winning the Bronze Star for his semi-military services in this action.

In 1950, critics were disappointed by “Across the River and into the Trees,” the story of a frustrated United States infantry colonel who goes to Venice to philosophize, make love and die. But two years later “The Old Man and the Sea” pleased virtually everyone. It relied on the elemental drama of a fisherman who catches the greatest marlin of his life, only to have it eaten to the skeleton by sharks before he can get it to port.

On Jan. 23, 1954, the writer and the fourth Mrs. Hemingway, the former Mary Welsh, figured in a double crash in Uganda, British East Africa. First reports said both had been killed. In fact, after one light plane crashed, a second had picked up the couple unhurt. Both Mr. Hemingway and his wife suffered injuries in the crack-up of the rescue plane.

Mr. Hemingway’s other published writings include “Three Stories and Ten Poems,” “In Our Time,” “The Torrents of Spring,” “Men Without Women,” and “The Fifth Column and First Forty-nine Stories.”

Mr. Hemingway earned millions of dollars from his work, partly because many of his stories and novels were adapted to the screen and television. These included “The Killers,” an early gangster story; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” both set in East Africa; “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Mr. Hemingway’s first wife was the former Hadley Richardson, whom he married in 1919. They were divorced in 1926. The next year Mr. Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. This marriage ended with divorce in 1940, and that year Mr. Hemingway married a novelist, Martha Gellhorn. In 1946, after their divorce, Mr. Hemingway married Miss Welsh. Along with his wife, Mr. Hemingway is survived by a sister and three sons.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

September 25, 1897–July 6, 1962

OXFORD, Miss.—William Faulkner died of a heart attack today in this Mississippi town that he made famous in literature.

The author was 64 years old. His wife, Estelle, was at his bedside.

In recent years Mr. Faulkner had spent much of his time at the University of Virginia, where he was a lecturer on American literature. He and his wife returned last May to Oxford, a community of about 8,000 that Mr. Faulkner used as home base throughout his career.

President [John F.] Kennedy, leading the nation in tributes to the author, said: “Since Henry James, no writer has left behind such a vast and enduring monument to the strength of American literature.”

Mr. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for 1949 for a series of novels in which he created his own Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi. There he set his Gothic saga of decadent sophisticates, greedy landlords, and shrewd and brutal tenant farmers.

Mr. Faulkner won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1954 novel, “The Fable.”

His most famous novels were “Absalom, Absalom!” “Sartoris,” “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Sanctuary” and “Light in August,” and the trilogy “The Hamlet,” “The Town” and “The Mansion.” His most recent novel, “The Reivers,” was published June 4 to critical acclaim.

In addition to his widow, survivors include his daughter and two brothers.

A key to Mr. Faulkner’s genius was the faculty he possessed of thinking and writing in the vernacular of poor whites and Negroes of his section.

The tales of Yoknapatawpha, interwoven with rape, violence and sadism, repelled some readers to the extent that recognition in his homeland had to await acclaim from abroad.

—United Press International

The storm of literary controversy that beat about William Faulkner is not likely to diminish with his death. Many of the most firmly established critics of literature were deeply impressed by the stark and somber power of his writing. Yet many commentators were repelled by his themes and his prose style.

To the sympathetic critics, Mr. Falkner dealt with the dark journey and the final doom of man in terms that recalled the Greek tragedians. They found symbolism in the frequently unrelieved brutality of the yokels of Yoknapatawpha County, the imaginary Deep South region from which Mr. Faulkner drew the persons and scenes of his most characteristic works.

Actually, Yoknapatawpha was Lafayette County and Jefferson town was the Oxford on the red-hill section of northern Mississippi where William Faulkner was reared and where his family had been deeply rooted for generations.

While admitting that Mr. Faulkner’s prose sometimes lurched and sprawled, his admirers could point out an undeniable golden sharpness of characterization and description.

Of Mr. Faulkner’s power to create living and deeply moving characters, Malcolm Cowley wrote:

“And Faulkner loved these people created in the image of the land. After a second reading of his novels, you continue to be impressed by his villains, Popeye and Jason and Joe Christmas and Flem Snopes: but this time you find more place in your memory for other figures standing a little in the background yet presented by the author with quiet affection: old ladies like Miss Jenny DuPré, with their sharp-tongued benevolence; shrewd but kindly bargainers like Ratliff, the sewing machine agent, and Will Varner, with his cotton gin and general store.”

Mr. Faulkner was an acknowledged master of the vivid descriptive phrase. Popeye had eyes that “looked like rubber knobs.” He had a face that “just went away, like the face of a wax doll set too near the fire and forgotten.”

The apt phrases that Mr. Faulkner found for the weather and the seasons were cited by his admirers. There was the “hot pine-winey silence of the August afternoon,” “the moonless September dust, the trees not rising soaring as trees should but squatting like huge fowl,” “those windless Mississippi December days which are a sort of Indian summer’s Indian summer.”

Many critics contended that Mr. Faulkner served up raw slabs of pseudorealism that had little merit as serious writing. They said that his writings showed an obsession with murder, rape, incest, suicide, greed and depravity that existed largely in the author’s mind.

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Miss., on Sept. 25, 1897.

The first Faulkners—the “u” is a recent restoration by William Faulkner—came to Mississippi in the Eighteen Forties. William Faulkner was the oldest child of Murray Falkner and Maude Butler Falkner. Murray Falkner ran a livery stable in Oxford and later became business manager of the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

In William Faulkner’s fiction the Sartoris clan is the Falkner family. The Sartorises are forced to make humiliating compromises with the members of the grasping and upstart Snopes family.

William Faulkner played quarterback on the Oxford High School football team but failed to graduate. Later he wrote: “Quit school to work in grandfather’s bank. Learned medicinal value of his liquor. Grandfather thought it was the janitor. Hard on the janitor.”

Oxford, where Mr. Faulkner grew up, is a typical Deep-South town. It has the traditional courthouse square flanked with statues of Confederate soldiers, and a quiet main street lined by one-story buildings and stores.

The 1949 motion picture “Intruder in the Dust,” based on Mr. Faulkner’s novel of that name, was filmed in Oxford.

The film depicted racial intolerance and bigotry in a small Southern community but had a “happy ending” in which an elderly, proud Negro accused of murder is saved from lynching by a white Southern lawyer with the help of a white boy and an elderly white woman. The movie was called “great” by Bosley Crowther, The New York Times critic.

Mr. Faulkner also said he had written a dozen movie scripts, most of them for his friend Howard Hawks, adding:

“He sent for me later to help adapt what Ernest Hemingway said was the worst book he ever wrote, ‘To Have and Have Not.’ Then I did another one, from that book by Raymond Chandler, ‘The Big Sleep.’ I also did a war picture, one I liked doing, ‘The Road to Glory,’ with Fredric March and Lionel Barrymore. I made me some money and I had me some fun.”

Back home, he was briefly a student at the University of Mississippi.

One who knew Mr. Faulkner as a student at the University of Mississippi is George W. Healy Jr., editor of The New Orleans Times-Picayune.

“I first knew Bill when he was postmaster at the University of Mississippi post office in 1922,” Mr. Healy said. “But Bill got fired as postmaster because he used the post office as a kind of men’s club. One day a post office inspector came in while a bridge game was in progress and a little while later Bill told us he was leaving.”

With the publication of “The Sound and the Fury” in 1929, Mr. Faulkner gave strong indications of being a major writer. The critics found in it something of the word-intoxication of James Joyce and the long, lasso-like sentences of Henry James.

“Sanctuary,” published in 1931, was Mr. Faulkner’s most popular and best-selling novel. It is about the harrowing experiences of a sensitive Southern girl, Temple Drake, who, like many Faulkner characters, reappears in another book, in this case “Requiem for a Nun.” One of Mr. Faulkner’s most memorable characters, Popeye, was created for “Sanctuary.”

Among Mr. Faulkner’s other notable books were “The Sound and the Fury” and “As I Lay Dying.” The former, described by one critic as “one of the few original efforts at experimental writing in America,” is told partly through the mind of an idiot named Benjy.

Mr. Faulkner lived and did most of his writing in Oxford in an old colonial house that he bought in 1930. He was a slightly built man who carried himself tensely, and when bothered or bored he could exhibit quick anger. He had thick iron-gray hair and a dark mustache. When he felt like it he could be charming and his manners were impeccable.

On one occasion, Bennett Cerf, head of Random House, Mr. Faulkner’s publisher, had taken the bourbon-sipping author to task for not answering his mail. Mr. Faulkner was said to have replied:

“Mr. Cerf, when I get a letter from you, I open it and shake it and if a check doesn’t fall out I tend to forget it.”

ROBERT FROST

March 26, 1874–January 29, 1963

BOSTON—Robert Frost, dean of American poets, died today at the age of 88.

He was pronounced dead at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital at 1:50 A.M. The cause was listed as “probably a pulmonary embolism,” or blood clot in the lungs.

Not long before his death, Mr. Frost had been dictating an article on Ezra Pound from his hospital bed when he fell asleep, according to his daughter, Leslie Frost.

—The Associated Press

Robert Frost was beyond doubt the only American poet to play a touching personal role at a Presidential inauguration; to report a casual remark of a Soviet dictator that stung officials in Washington, and to twit the Russians about the barrier to Berlin by reading to them, on their own ground, his celebrated poem about another kind of wall.

But it would be much more to the point to say he was also without question the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes and, in his ninth decade, to symbolize the rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit more than any other man.

Finally, it might have been even more appropriate to link his uniqueness to his breathtaking sense of exactitude in the use of metaphors based on direct observations (“I don’t like to write anything I don’t see,” he told an interviewer in Cambridge, Mass., two days before his 88th birthday.)

Thus he recorded timelessly how the swimming buck pushed the “crumpled” water; how the wagon’s wheels “freshly sliced” the April mire; how the ice crystals from the frozen birch snapped off and went “avalanching” on the snowy crust.

The incident of Jan. 20, 1961—when John F. Kennedy took the oath as President—was perhaps the most dramatic of Mr. Frost’s “public” life.

Invited to write a poem for the occasion, he rose to read it. But the blur of the sun and the edge of the wind hampered him; his brief plight was so moving that a photograph of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson watching him won a prize because of the deep apprehension in their faces.

But Mr. Frost was not daunted. Aware of the problem, he simply put aside the new poem and recited from memory an old favorite, “The Gift Outright,” dating to the nineteen-thirties. It fit the circumstances as snugly as a glove.

In 1962, Mr. Frost accompanied Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the Interior, on a visit to Moscow.

A first encounter with Soviet children, studying English, did not encourage the poet. He recognized the problem posed by the language; it was painfully ironic, because he had said years before that poetry was what was “lost in translation.”

But a few days later, he read “Mending Wall” at a Moscow literary evening. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the poem begins. The Russians may not have got the subsequent nuances. But the idea quickly spread that the choice of the poem was not unrelated to the wall partitioning Berlin.

On Sept. 7, the poet had a long talk with Premier Khrushchev. He described the Soviet leader as “no fathead”; as smart, big and “not a coward.”

“He’s not afraid of us and we’re not afraid of him,” he added.

Subsequently, Mr. Frost reported that Mr. Khrushchev had said the United States was “too liberal to fight.” It was this remark that caused a considerable stir in Washington.

Explaining why he invited Mr. Frost to speak at his inauguration, President Kennedy said, “I think politicians and poets share at least one thing, and that is their greatness depends upon the courage with which they face the challenges of life.”

The President was echoing a cry that Mr. Frost had long made—the higher role of the poet in a business society. “Everyone comes down to Washington to get equal with someone else,” he told a Senate education subcommittee. “I want our poets to be declared equal to—what shall I say?—the scientists. No, to big business.”

Many years before, he told young writers gathered under Bread Loaf Mountain at Middlebury, Vt.:

“Every artist must have two fears—the fear of God and the fear of man—fear of God that his creation will ultimately be found unworthy, and the fear of man that he will be misunderstood by his fellows.”

These two fears were ever present in Robert Frost, with the result that his published verses were of the highest order and completely understood by thousands of Americans in whom they struck a ready response. To countless persons who had never seen New Hampshire birches in the snow or caressed a perfect ax he exemplified a great American tradition with his superb, almost angular verses written out of the New England scene.

His pictures of an abandoned cord of wood warming “the frozen swamp as best it could with the slow smokeless burning of decay,” or of how “two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,” with their Yankee economy of words, moved his readers nostalgically and filled the back pastures of their mind with memories of a shrewd and quiet way of life.

Strangely enough, Mr. Frost spent 20 years writing his verses about stone walls and brown earth, blue butterflies and tall, slim trees without winning any recognition in America. It was not until “A Boy’s Will” was published in England and Ezra Pound publicized it that Mr. Frost was recognized as the indigenous American poet that he was.

In the years that followed, besides receiving the four Pulitzers, he was to be honored by institutions of higher learning and find it possible for a poet to earn enough money so that he would not have to teach or farm or make shoes or write for newspapers—all things he had done in his early days.

Like many another Yankee individualist, Mr. Frost was a rebel. He was the son of an ardent Democrat whose belief in the Confederacy led him to name his son Robert Lee. The father, William Frost, had run away from Amherst, Mass., to go West; Robert was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. His mother, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, emigrated to Philadelphia when she was a girl.

His father died when Robert was about 11. The boy and his mother, the former Isabelle Moody, went to live at Lawrence, Mass., with William Prescott Frost, Robert’s grandfather, who gave the boy a good schooling. Influenced by the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert wanted to be a poet before he went to Dartmouth College, where he stayed only through 1892.

In the next several years he worked as a bobbin boy in the Lawrence mills, as a shoemaker and as a reporter for The Lawrence Sentinel. He attended Harvard in 1897–98, then became a farmer at Derry, N.H., and taught there. In 1905 he married Elinor White, also a teacher, by whom he had five children. In 1912 Mr. Frost sold the farm and the family went to England.

He came home to find the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asking for poems. He sent along the very ones the magazine had previously rejected, and they were published. The Frosts went to Franconia, N.H., to live in a farm house Mr. Frost had bought for $1,000. His poetry brought him some money, and in 1916 he again became a teacher. He was a professor of English, then “poet in residence” for more than 20 years at Amherst College. He spent two years in a similar capacity at the University of Michigan. Later Frost lectured and taught at The New School in New York.

In 1938 he retired temporarily as a teacher. Mrs. Frost died that year in Florida. Afterward, he taught intermittently at Harvard, Amherst and Dartmouth.

While critics heaped belated praise on his earthy, Yankee poems, there were also finely fashioned lyrics in which the man of the soil flashed fire with intellect. Such a poem was “Reluctance” with its nostalgic ending:

Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than treason

To go with the drift of things, to yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end of a love or a season?

Or:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Asked about his method of writing a poem, Mr. Frost said: “I have worried quite a number of them into existence, but any sneaking preference [I have had] remains for the ones I have carried through like the stroke of a racquet, club or headsman’s ax.”

In another interview he observed: “If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.”

T. S. ELIOT

September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965

LONDON—T. S. Eliot, the quiet, gray figure who gave new meaning to English-language poetry, died today at his home in London. He was 76 years old.

Eliot was an American who moved to England at the beginning of World War I and became wholly identified with Britain, even becoming naturalized in 1927.

The influence of Eliot began with the publication in 1917 of his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Perhaps his most significant contribution came five years later in the lengthy poem “The Waste Land.”

Eliot, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, was a convert to Anglo-Catholicism, and his religious belief showed up strongly in his later works.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

These four lines by Thomas Stearns Eliot, written as the conclusion to “The Hollow Men” in 1925, are probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English. They are also the essence of Eliot as he established his reputation as a poet of post–World War I disillusion and despair.

They were written by an expatriate from St. Louis, a graduate of Harvard College, who had chosen to live in London and who was working as a bank clerk.

Together with “The Waste Land,” published three years earlier, these works established Eliot as a major poet. From there he went on to fame and financial independence, but he always remained, in the layman’s view, the poet of gray melancholy.

Eliot’s early poems did not represent the more mature conclusions of his later years about the state of mankind and the world, as stated in “The Four Quartets,” or his delicious sense of humor, whose subjects included himself:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With his features of clerical cut.

And his brow so grim

And his mouth so prim…

Whereas Eliot began his seminal “The Waste Land” with the line “April is the cruellest month” and ended it 434 lines later with “Shantih shantih shantih,” his more seasoned reflections included these lines from “The Four Quartets”:

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realized;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

Not only did Eliot shift his philosophic outlook, but his poetic accents also became almost conversational.

In appearance he was an unlikely figure for a poet. Eliot was a stooped man of just over 6 feet who had a prim appearance which mingled with a slight air of anxiety.

He lacked flamboyance or oddity in dress or manner, and there was nothing of the romantic about him. His habits of work were equally “unpoetic,” for he eschewed bars and cafes for the bourgeois comforts of an office with padded chairs and a well-lighted desk.

Eliot’s attire was a model of the London man of business. He wore a bowler and often carried a tightly rolled umbrella. His accent, which started out as pure American Middle West, became over the years quite upper-class British.

The poet was born on Sept. 26, 1888, into a family that had a good background in the intellectual, religious and business life of New England.

He entered Harvard in 1906 in the class that included Water Lippmann, Heywood Broun, and John Reed. He completed his undergraduate work in three years and took a Master of Arts degree in his fourth. Although he never took his doctorate, he completed the dissertation in 1916.

His Harvard classmates recall that he dressed with the studied carelessness of a British gentleman, smoked a pipe and liked to be left alone. This aspect of Eliot was hardly altered when he briefly returned to Harvard in the nineteen-thirties as a sort of poet in residence.

In that sojourn he lived in an undergraduate house near the Charles River and entertained students at teas. The tea was always brewed and he poured with great delicacy, his long fingers clasping the handle of the silver teapot. The quality of his tea, the excellence of the petit fours and the rippling flow of his conversation drew overflow crowds of students.

Eliot was an omnivorous reader. He consumed philosophy, languages and letters, and this lent his poetry an erudition and scholarship unmatched in this century. He footnoted “The Waste Land” as though it were a doctoral thesis.

He had a strong dislike for most teaching of poetry, and once recalled that he had been turned against Shakespeare in his youth by didactical instructors.

“I took a dislike to ‘Julius Caesar’ which lasted, I am sorry to say, until I saw the film of Marlon Brando and John Gielgud,” he said, “and a dislike to ‘The Merchant of Venice’ which persists to this day.”

In 1915 Eliot became a teacher in the Highgate School in London, and the next year went to work in Lloyds Bank, Ltd.

In London, Eliot lived in a comfortable apartment in Chelsea overlooking the Thames. In 1915, he married Miss Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who died in 1947. In 1957, Eliot married Miss Valerie Fletcher, his private secretary. He was then 68 and his bride about 30.

Eliot’s association with the “little” magazines—those voices of protest against the Establishment—began when he was assistant editor of Egoist from 1917 to 1919.

He established The Criterion, a literary publication that never had a circulation exceeding 900. Later he was an editor for Faber & Faber.

The first poem that started Eliot’s reputation was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1917. In it he assumed the pose of a fastidious, world-weary, young-old man, aging into ironic wit. The poem is full of exquisitely precise surrealist images and rhythms, but it also has everyday metaphors. Part of it goes:

I grow old… I grow old…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

Eliot’s strictures on applying concentrated efforts to the understanding of poetry could well apply to his next major poem, “The Waste Land.” Heavily influenced by Ezra Pound, “The Waste Land” was an expression of gigantic frustration and despair.

The poem, a series of somewhat blurred visions, centers on an imaginary waste region, the home of the Fisher King, a little-known figure in mythology, who is sexually impotent. The work made his reputation.

Eliot was regarded as an important literary critic as well as a poet. His first book, “The Sacred Wood,” was published in 1920.

It is possible that Eliot is most widely known through his drama “Murder in the Cathedral,” a sardonic account of the murder of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170.

Two of Eliot’s plays enjoyed critical success in London and New York. “The Cocktail Party,” published in 1954, was a story of deeply religious experience told against a background of highly literate and amusing British people. “The Confidential Clerk” told of bastardy and general unhappiness.

In his lighter moments Eliot was an unabashed ailurophile. He kept cats at home, bestowing upon them such names as Man in White Spats; he also wrote a book of poems called “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.”

These lines from “The Naming of Cats” illustrate Eliot’s profound insight into the narcissistic world of the feline:

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular.

A name that is peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular.

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

. . . When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name;

His ineffable effable

Effeineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Those critical of Eliot’s writing accused him of obscurity for its own sake. They found his verses full of coy and precious mannerisms. They accused him of loading down his writing with obscure references that could be known only by a few intimate friends.

Yet no man between the two World Wars so dominated his time as critic and creator. This expatriate American caught and expressed in his verse the sense of a doomed world, of fragmentation, of a wasteland of the spirit that moved the generation after the war.

It was a generation that felt tricked by the politicians, felt that the enormous bloodletting of World War I had been a fraud and saw in the disintegrating Europe of their time the symbol of their own lives. Their mood of spiritual despair was exquisitely rendered in Eliot’s poetry.

The dry tone, the arid physical and spiritual landscape of his early poetry, and the bleakness that stared out of his verse summed up for a generation their own sense of defeat and barrenness. They echoed his words, “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.”

LANGSTON HUGHES

February 1, 1902–May 22, 1967

By Thomas Lask

Langston Hughes, the noted writer of novels, stories, poems and plays about Negro life, died last night in Polyclinic Hospital [in Manhattan] at the age of 65.

Mr. Hughes, who died of congestive heart failure, was sometimes characterized as the “O. Henry of Harlem.” He was an extremely versatile and productive author who was well known for his folksy humor.

In a description of himself written for “Twentieth Century Authors,” Mr. Hughes wrote:

“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong.”

“I live in Harlem, New York City,” he continued. “I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”

It was said that whenever Mr. Hughes had a pencil and paper in his hands, he would scribble poetry. He recalled an anecdote about how he was “discovered” by the poet Vachel Lindsay.

Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington when a busboy summoned his courage and slipped several sheets of paper beside the poet’s plate. Lindsay was annoyed, but he picked up the papers and read a poem titled “The Weary Blues.”

As Lindsay read, his interest grew. He called for the busboy and asked, “Who wrote this!”

“I did,” replied Langston Hughes.

Lindsay introduced the youth to publishers, who brought out such works as “Shakespeare in Harlem,” “The Dream Keeper,” “Not Without Laughter,’ and “The Ways of White Folks” as well as the initial “The Weary Blues.”

“My writing,” Mr. Hughes said, “has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.”

In one of his many anecdotes Mr. Hughes explained that he became a poet when he was named “class poet” in grammar school in Lincoln, Ill.

“I was a victim of a stereotype,” he observed wryly. “There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry.

“Well, everybody knows—except us—that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me class poet. I felt I couldn’t let my white classmates down, and I’ve been writing poetry ever since.”

James Langston Hughes, who dropped his first name, was born in Joplin, Mo., on Feb. 1, 1902. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a storekeeper.

After his graduation from Central High School in Cleveland, he went to Mexico and then attended Columbia University for a year. Mr. Hughes held a variety of jobs, including seaman on trips to Europe and Africa and busboy at the Washington hotel where he presented his poetry to Lindsay.

His first book, “The Weary Blues,” was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1925.

A scholarship enabled him to complete his education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

His output was prodigious: poems, short stories, novels, librettos, lyrics, juveniles, pageants, anthologies, translations, television scripts. Between “The Weary Blues,” his first book of poems, and “The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers,” his last anthology, published in March, there were three dozen books.

His work lacked the power of the Negro writers who came after him. He felt as strongly as they did, but he was more amiable in expression. He was close to those he wrote about, and he captured their speech and their wry approach to life into his books.

No poetry of our day has caught the syncopated quality of jazz better than Mr. Hughes’s “Dream Boogie,” “Parade,” and “Warning: Augmented.” The plain speech of his verse and the ordinary subject matter often received as much criticism from Negroes as from those white people who couldn’t see his writing as poetry. The Negroes felt it lacked the proper dignity that was their due. They were right. What the poetry had instead was life—a quality that has kept it fresh and spirited over the years.

Mr. Hughes will be recognized for what he was: an American writer of charm and vitality.

Despite the variety of form, Mr. Hughes’s subject was nearly always the same: what it is like to be a black man in the United States. More gently than a younger generation of Negro writers would have preferred, Mr. Hughes always found the funny side of that life.

One of his most memorable characters, Jesse B. Semple, nicknamed Simple in the three books that Mr. Hughes wrote about him, spoke his mind with wry understatement.

“White folks,” Simple said, “is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life.”

Sometimes Mr. Hughes wrote about the adventures of Simple’s cousin, Minnie, who was in Harlem during the riots of 1964. “My advice to all womens taking in riots is to leave your wig at home,” said Minnie, who had lost hers.

This approach inevitably laid Mr. Hughes open to charges of clouding the bitter realities of racial strife with evasive humor.

He replied that he did not think the race problem was “too deep for comic relief.”

“Colored people are always laughing at some wry Jim Crow incident or absurd nuance of the color line,” he said. “If Negroes took all the white world’s boorishness to heart and wept over it as profoundly as our serious writers do, we would have been dead long ago.”

His defense was given more credence in light of the fact that Mr. Hughes’s humor did not disguise a compassion for his people and their oppressors, best expressed in the title of a collection of his short stories: “Laughing to Keep from Crying.”

Nor was Simple simply a clown. “Where do white folks get off calling everything bad black?” he once asked. “I would like to change all that around and say that the people who Jim Crow me have a white heart.”

Simple, who in 1957 became the hero of a Broadway musical, “Simply Heavenly,” may be Mr. Hughes’s most lasting contribution to literature. But it was as a poet that he first came to public attention.

His best work was stripped, laconic, set to an unheard blues beat. His interest in rhythm made him a follower of the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay in the 1920s.

“Weary Blues,” the poem Mr. Hughes showed Mr. Lindsay that fateful night at the Wardman Park Hotel, was full of the songs that Mr. Hughes had been hearing all his life—“gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn’t help being sad sometimes,” as he later said. “My best poems were all written when I felt the worst.”

Mr. Hughes was born on Feb. 1, 1902, in Joplin, Mo. His mother, Carrie, had been a grammar school teacher in Guthrie, Okla., when she met his father, James, a storekeeper. His parents separated shortly after his birth and he lived with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kan., until he was 12.

Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston was a tough, self-reliant woman whose first husband had been killed in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and whose second husband had been active in the underground railway.

His father financed a year’s education for him at Columbia University. He found it a stale year, and decided to sign on as a freighter-hand and see the world.

The first freighter he could get was bound for Africa. “With that trip,” he said, “I began to live.” Impulsively, he threw all his books overboard and resolved to see things through his own eyes. Eventually he landed in Paris, where he lived for a year, supporting himself by washing dishes.

Mr. Hughes completed his formal education at Lincoln University, graduating in 1929.

The books that followed maintained his first success, particularly “Not Without Laughter,” a novel; “The Ways of White Folks,” short stories; “The Big Sea,” an autobiography; “Shakespeare in Harlem,” poems, and the Simple books: “Simple Speaks His Mind,” “Simple Takes a Wife” and “Simple Stakes a Claim.”

He also continued traveling, covering the Spanish Civil War for The Baltimore Afro-American, and visiting Cuba, Haiti, Africa, and the Soviet Union.

One of Mr. Hughes’s poems provided the title for Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun.”

What happens to a dream deferred

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The theater tempted him, and he had considerable success in it. He wrote the lyrics for Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” a play called “Mulatto,” which had a successful run in New York though it was banned in Philadelphia because it dealt with miscegenation, and “Black Nativity.”

Mr. Hughes, who is survived by a brother, an uncle and an aunt, was charged during the McCarthy era with having belonged to several so-called Communist front organizations in the nineteen-thirties, a charge he did not deny, although he said he had never been a Communist.

Far from expressing dismay that some of his earlier books had been removed from United States Information Agency libraries around the world, Mr. Hughes told investigators that he was surprised they had been on the shelves in the first place.

NOËL COWARD

December 16, 1899–March 26, 1973

By Albin Krebs

Sir Noël Coward, whose light sharp wit enlivened the English stage for half a century as actor, playwright, songwriter, composer and director, died of a heart attack as he was preparing to have morning coffee yesterday in his villa, Blue Harbor, on the coast of Jamaica in the West Indies. He was 73 years old.

Hailed here and in London in the nineteen-twenties as a master of sophisticated, then-daring comedy, Sir Noël also sounded patriotic themes in “Cavalcade” between the wars and in “In Which We Serve,” a film about the Royal Navy in World War II. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1970.

“The world has treated me very well,” Sir Noël once said, adding, “but then I haven’t treated it so badly, either.”

The remark, typically free of self-effacement, constituted fair comment. In his 63 years as a theatrical jack-of-all-trades (and master of most), the urbane Sir Noël gave the world unstintingly of what he called “a talent to amuse.”

He wrote 27 comedies, dramas and musicals for the stage, the best-known of which were “Private Lives,” “Blithe Spirit,” “Cavalcade” and “Bitter-Sweet.”

Among the 281 songs for which he provided words and music—that he could not read notes did not deter him—were several that have become standards, including “Someday I’ll Find You,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Mad About the Boy” and “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”

Of his films, the most memorable were the World War II epic of courage, “In Which We Serve,” and “Brief Encounter,” still considered one of the finest movies about romantic love.

In the last few years there has been an enormous revival of interest in the works of Sir Noël. Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens starred on the London stage in productions of “Design for Living” and “Private Lives.” Two revues culled from Sir Noël’s shows, songs and autobiographies are playing to capacity audiences.

The multitalented Sir Noël often acted in, directed and produced his own plays and films, and in the nineteen-fifties he turned to the new career of cabaret performer. By then, however, he had established himself as a major spokesman, in the dramatic arts, of an era—those two dazzling decades between two World Wars during which a generation of chic, smart-talking young people delighted in shocking their Victorian elders.

Because he often dealt with amoral characters who used mildly profane language and talked about sex, Sir Noël’s plays ran into censorship troubles. There were also objections to the fact that most of his stage characters were rich, spoiled, neurotic, vain, snobbish and selfish, but he made them bearable and even attractive by putting into their mouths an endless string of witticisms.

Some critics said there was too much humor, too much glittering, effervescent polish in his writing. “Private Lives” contained such lines as “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs,” which helped create the impression, for some, that the play was all sparkle and no fire.

On a deeper level, however, “Private Lives” and other Coward plays dealt with characters who almost continually said one thing while thinking another. The surface badinage was a cover. The relationships he repeatedly examined were those of people who couldn’t live together yet couldn’t live apart. In many ways, Sir Noël’s personal life and his personality resembled those of his characters. He was witty, generous, jaded, mercurial, sophisticated, lonely, snobbish.

In conversations, he sprinkled quips like salt. When asked whether he had ever tried to enlighten his audiences as well as amuse them, he replied: “I have a slight reforming urge, but I have rather cunningly kept it down.”

Sir Noël gave the appearance of being a great bon vivant, inhabiting a world of celebrity in which he enjoyed the friendship of such persons as Sir Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lynn Fontanne, George Bernard Shaw, Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich.

Born Noël Pierce Coward on Dec. 16, 1899, in Teddington, near London, the future actor, singer, dancer, playwright, author, composer, librettist, lyricist and director was the son of Arthur Sabin Coward, an organist who was forced to work as a piano and organ salesman to support his family.

Sir Noël’s mother, the former Violet Agnes Veitch, was one of those doting stage mothers who relentlessly pushed their children forward in the theater. She remained the strongest influence in her son’s life until she died in 1954 at the age of 91.

Young Coward learned to play the piano by ear, but his formal education, which ended when he was 14, was haphazard. At 10 he made his professional debut on the London stage as Prince Mussel in an all-child production of “The Goldfish.” Soon he was bedeviling every producer in London for work.

“I was a brazen, odious little prodigy,” he said, “overpleased with myself and precocious to a degree. I was a talented boy, God knows, and when washed and smarmed down a bit, passably attractive.”

By 1914 he was touring as Slightly in “Peter Pan.” In 1918, when he was 19, he wrote his first play, “The Rat Trap,” which was not produced until 1926. Sir Noël developed a lifelong fondness for Americans during a stay of several months in New York in 1921. From then on he shuttled between London and New York, and came to regard the latter city as his second home.

His first stage success was “The Vortex,” which he wrote in 1923 and starred in the following year in London. The play was a melodrama and its central characters, a drug addict and his nymphomaniacal mother, shocked and titillated audiences.

At one point in 1925, three of London’s biggest stage successes were Coward hits. While he was still appearing in “The Vortex,” his revue “On with the Dance,” for which he wrote the book and songs, opened to raves, and his comedy of bad manners, “Hay Fever,” which he directed, was also successful. The same year marked the opening of his comedy “Fallen Angels.”

Success piled on top of success as Sir Noël’s plays were produced in New York, Paris and Berlin. In 1928 he turned out “This Year of Grace!,” a revue, and the next year the sentimental operetta “Bitter-Sweet,” which became an international hit. At the time he completed “Bitter-Sweet” he was appearing in “This Year of Grace!” in New York, and, he said, he composed the operetta’s best-known song, “I’ll See You Again,” while his taxi was caught in a traffic jam.

The pace at which he worked and lived took its toll. In 1930 he suffered a breakdown and took a long voyage to the Orient to recuperate. He could not resist the urge to work, however, and in four days, propped up in bed in his Shanghai hotel, he wrote “Private Lives,” the comedy that he had promised his friend, Gertrude Lawrence, to write for them to act in.

“‘Private Lives’ was described variously as ‘tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent and delightfully daring,’” Sir Noël said, “all of which connotated to the public mind cocktails, evening dress, repartee and irreverent allusions to copulation, thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office.”

They did. “Private Lives” became the most popular and profitable Coward work. For himself and his friends the Lunts, Sir Noël wrote “Design for Living,” in which they appeared in New York in 1933. Meanwhile, “Cavalcade” had been staged in London and filmed in Hollywood. His 1933 musical, “Conversation Piece,” featured the songs “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart” and “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.” Later in the thirties he wrote and appeared with Miss Lawrence in “Tonight at 8:30,” a brace of short plays; “Present Laughter” and “This Happy Breed.” His biggest hit in World War II was “Blithe Spirit.”

“I behaved through most of the war with gallantry tinged, I suspect, by a strong urge to show off,” Sir Noël said. Actually, in addition to writing, producing, acting in and codirecting “In Which We Serve,” an important contribution to British morale, he drove himself to a physical breakdown by entertaining troops in Asia and Africa.

After the war, there was a pronounced shift in Sir Noël’s fortunes. The critics began to conclude that he and his work were outdated. In 1955 his bank overdraft was more than $60,000.

He fell back on two solutions to his problems: One was to take his cabaret act to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, which paid him $40,000 a week to entertain what Sir Noël called “Nescafé Society.” The other was to escape high taxes in England by taking up residence in Jamaica and Switzerland.

The climate of the theater and the temper of the times had changed sufficiently by 1966 that Sir Noël was able to write and act in his most intensely autobiographical play, “A Song at Twilight.” The play concerns an aging homosexual writer who has not been able to write truthfully about himself in his work. Confronted by a blackmailer who upbraids him for having masked his homosexuality in his art and his life, the writer replies:

“Was that so unpardonable? I was young, ambitious and already almost a public figure. Was it so base of me to try to show to the world that I was capable of playing the game according to the rules?”

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

March 26, 1911–February 25, 1983

By Mel Gussow

Tennessee Williams, whose innovative drama and sense of lyricism were a major force in the postwar American theater, died yesterday at the age of 71. He was found dead in his suite in the Hotel Elysee on East 54th Street.

Officials said that death was due to natural causes.

The author of more than 24 full-length plays, including “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the last two works winners of Pulitzer Prizes, Tennessee Williams was the most important American playwright after Eugene O’Neill.

He had a profound effect on the American theater and on American playwrights and actors, and he wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about society’s outcasts. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart. His works, which are among the most popular plays of our time, continue to provide a rich reservoir of acting challenges. Among the actors celebrated in Williams roles were Laurette Taylor in “The Glass Menagerie,” Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (and Vivien Leigh in the movie version), and Burl Ives in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

“The Glass Menagerie,” his first success, was his “memory play.” Many of his other plays were his nightmares. His plays were almost all intensely personal, torn from his own private anguishes and anxieties.

He once described his sister’s room in the family home in St. Louis, with her collection of glass figures, as representing “all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past.” But, he remembered, outside the room was an alley in which, nightly, dogs destroyed cats.

Mr. Williams’s work, which was unequaled in passion and imagination by any of his contemporaries’ works, was a barrage of conflicts, of the blackest horrors offset by purity. Perhaps his greatest character, Blanche Du Bois, the heroine of “Streetcar,” has been described as a tigress and a moth. As Mr. Williams created her, there was no contradiction. His basic premise, he said, was “the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance.”

Just as his work reflected his life, his life reflected his work. A monumental hypochondriac, he became obsessed with sickness, failure and death. Several times he thought he was losing his sight, and he had four operations for cataracts. Constantly he thought his heart would stop beating. In desperation, he drank and took pills immoderately.

He was a man of great shyness, but with friends he showed great openness, which often worked to his disadvantage. He was extremely vulnerable to demands—from directors, actresses, the public, his critics, admirers and detractors. Unfavorable reviews devastated him.

Success arrived suddenly in 1945, with the Broadway premiere of “The Glass Menagerie,” and it frightened him much more than failure.

He was born as Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Miss., on March 26, 1911. His mother, the former Edwina Dakin, was the daughter of an Episcopal rector. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a traveling salesman who later settled down in St. Louis. There was an older daughter, Rose (memorialized as Laura in “the Glass Menagerie”), and in 1919 another son was born, Walter Dakin.

“It was just a wrong marriage,” the playwright wrote of his parents. His mother was the model for the foolish but indomitable Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” his father for the brutish Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

While his father traveled, Tom was mostly brought up, and overprotected, by his mother, particularly after he contracted diphtheria at the age of five. By the time the family moved to St. Louis, the pattern was clear. Young Tom retreated into himself. He made up and told stories, many of them scary.

In the fall of 1929 he went off to the University of Missouri to study journalism, but soon dropped out and took a job as a clerk in a shoe company. It was, he recalled, “living death.”

To survive, every day after work he retreated to his room and wrote—stories, poems, plays—through the night. The strain led to a nervous breakdown. Sent to Memphis to recuperate, he joined a local theater group.

In 1937, Mr. Williams re-enrolled as a student, this time at the University of Iowa. There and in St. Louis he wrote an enormous number of plays, some of which were produced on campus. He graduated in 1938.

Success seemed paired with tragedy. His sister lost her mind. The family allowed a prefrontal lobotomy to be performed, and she spent much of her life in a sanitarium.

At 28, Thomas Williams left home for New Orleans. There he changed his style of living as well as his name, to become Tennessee Williams, and there he discovered new netherworlds, soaking up the milieu that would appear in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” He wrote stories, some of which later became plays, and entered a Group Theater playwriting contest. He won $100 and was solicited by the agent Audrey Wood, who became his friend and adviser.

“Battle of Angels,” a play he wrote during a visit to St. Louis, opened in Boston in 1940, closed in two weeks and did not come to New York. Mr. Williams, however, brought it back in a revised version in 1957 as “Orpheus Descending” and as the Marlon Brando–Anna Magnani movie, “The Fugitive Kind.”

To his amazement, Audrey Wood got him a job in Hollywood writing scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at $250 a week. Disdainfully, he began writing an original screenplay, which was rejected. Still under contract, he began turning the screenplay into a play titled “The Gentleman Caller,” which evolved into “The Glass Menagerie.” On March 31, 1945, five days after its author became 34, it opened on Broadway and changed Mr. Williams’s life and the American theater. He was inundated with success—the play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award—and he fought to keep afloat.

“Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle,” he wrote, “you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.” Realizing that his art was his salvation, he wrote his second masterpiece, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Opening in 1947, “Streetcar” was an even bigger hit than “The Glass Menagerie.” It won Mr. Williams his second Drama Critics’ award and his first Pulitzer Prize.

For many years after “Streetcar,” almost every other season there was another Williams play on Broadway. Soon there was a continual flow from the stage to the screen. For more than 35 years, the stream was unabated. He produced an enormous body of work, including more than two dozen full-length plays, all of them produced, a record unequaled by any of his contemporaries. There were successes and failures, and often great disagreement over which was which. In 1948 there was “Summer and Smoke,” which failed on Broadway, was a huge success in a revival Off Broadway and made a star of Geraldine Page, one of many magnificent leading ladies in Mr. Williams’s works (others were Laurette Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Maureen Stapleton, Anna Magnani). There followed “The Rose Tattoo,” “Camino Real,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (his second Pulitzer), “Orpheus Descending,” “Garden District” and “Sweet Bird of Youth.”

He also wrote two novels, the film “Baby Doll,” and his “Memoirs,” in which for the first time he wrote in detail about his homosexuality.

As he became increasingly successful, Mr. Williams became somewhat portly and seedy. Gradually he found it harder and harder to write. The turning point, as he saw it, was 1955, and after “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” there was a noticeable decline in his work. To keep going, he began relying on a combination of coffee, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol.

“The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961, was his last major success. After “Iguana,” Mr. Williams seemed to fall apart. But at the same time he discovered religion. In 1968 he was converted to Roman Catholicism, and his last plays, though still dealing with grotesques, also dealt with salvation.

“The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” which failed on Broadway and as an Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton movie entitled “Boom!,” was an allegory about a Christlike young man and a dying dowager.

In recent years, Mr. Williams, who is survived by his brother and his sister, divided his time between his apartment in New York and his house in Key West.

“I always felt like Tennessee and I were compatriots,” said Marlon Brando. “He told the truth as best he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him. We are all diminished by his death.”

JORGE LUIS BORGES

August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986

By Edward A. Gargan

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine short-story writer, poet and essayist who was considered one of Latin America’s greatest writers, died yesterday in Geneva, where he had been living for three months. He was 86 years old.

Mr. Borges died of liver cancer, said the executor of his estate, Osvaldo Luis Vidaurre.

While almost unknown outside Argentina before 1961, his stories, punctilious in their language and mysterious in their opaque paradoxes, attained a following that grew to international proportions. His writings explored the crannies of the human psyche, the fantastic within the apparently mundane, imaginary bestiaries and fables of obscure libraries and arcane scholarship. Many hailed him as the century’s most important Latin American writer.

Among his works of fiction that have appeared in the United States are “Ficciones,” “The Aleph and Other Stories” and “Labyrinths,” all published in 1962, and “A Universal History of Infamy,” in 1971. Among his collections of essays available in English are “The Book of Imaginary Beings” and “An Introduction to American Literature.” “Selected Poems, 1923–1967” was published in 1972 and “In Praise of Darkness,” consisting of poetry and short pieces, in 1974.

In 1975 John Updike wrote that Mr. Borges’s “driest paragraph is somehow compelling.”

“His fables are written from a height of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction,” he said. “Furthermore, he is, at least for anyone whose taste runs to puzzles or pure speculation, delightfully entertaining.”

For Mr. Borges, the short story was the most compelling form. “In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books,” he wrote, “I have read but few novels and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page. I have always been a reader and rereader of short stories.”

Beginning in 1927, when he had a series of operations on his eyes, Mr. Borges was increasingly afflicted by blindness. While he called the condition a “slow, summer twilight,” it did not impede his work.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires on Aug. 24, 1899. His father “was a philosophical anarchist,” Mr. Borges wrote, and a teacher of psychology. His mother translated American classics into Spanish.

At the age of six or seven, the young Borges began to write. “I was expected to be a writer,” he recalled later in life. He confessed that his first writing was modeled on classic Spanish writers, mostly [Miguel de] Cervantes.

In 1914 the family moved to Europe so that Jorge could attend school in Geneva. In the College of Geneva he was immersed in Latin, and outside it he tackled German, eventually finding his way to [Arthur] Schopenhauer.

“Were I to choose a single philosopher, I would choose him,” Mr. Borges wrote. “If the riddle of the universe can be stated in words, I think these words would be in his writings.”

After Mr. Borges received his degree, his family moved to Spain, where his first poem, “Hymn to the Sea,” was published. In 1921, he returned with his family to Buenos Aires, where he continued to write.

The “real beginning” of his career, Mr. Borges wrote, came in the early 1930’s with a series of sketches called “A Universal History of Infamy.” In these, which “were in the nature of hoaxes and pseudo-essays,” Mr. Borges chronicled the lives of Lazarus Morell, who both freed and imprisoned slaves; of Tom Castro, an implausible prodigal son; of the widow Ching, a pirate who terrorized the seas of Asia; of Monk Eastman, a New York gunman and “purveyor of iniquities”; of Kotsuke no Suke, who refused to commit hara-kiri, “which as a nobleman was his duty.”

With Mr. Borges’s next story, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” written in 1935, the shape of many of his later stories was established. The story is a fictive review of a book purportedly published in Bombay. Mr. Borges invests the mythical volume with a genuine publisher and reviewer but, as he wrote later, “the author and the book are entirely my own invention.”

In this story, many of the basic literary elements that came to characterize Mr. Borges’s style were apparent: a concern for history and identity; the central role of an obscure scholarly work; a maze of discourse laden with elaborate and Byzantine detail; footnotes; meticulous references to remote academic journals, and deliberately translucent paradox.

Mr. Borges took his first full-time job in 1937 as an assistant in a branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library; he remained there for nine years, completing his work each day in an hour and devoting the rest of his time to reading and writing. In this period, he wrote the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” which he described as a “halfway house between the essay and true tale.”

“Pierre Menard” led to a story of a strange world that displaces our planet—“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—and then to stories concerned with labyrinths and mirrors and encyclopedias that came to form the foundation of Mr. Borges’s oeuvre. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” an anthology of short stories, was published in 1941. Three years later “Ficciones,” perhaps his most celebrated collection of short stories, went into print.

In 1946, Juan Domingo Peron—“a President,” Mr. Borges wrote, “whose name I do not want to remember”—came to power. Soon afterward, Mr. Borges was named inspector of poultry and rabbits in the public markets, but later resigned.

After the Peron Government was overthrown in 1955, Mr. Borges was appointed director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. The next year he became a professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

By the late 1950’s, Mr. Borges was completely blind. “One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics,” he wrote later. “In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones.”

Some have insisted that Mr. Borges’s unwillingness to criticize the repression of post-Peronist regimes kept him from becoming a Nobel laureate. He was, however, sympathetic to the plight of mothers whose children were victims of death squads that were supported by Argentina’s military Government. “I had my say about the disappeared,” he once said. “But what can I do? I’m an old man. What can they do to me? Torture me, eh?”

Mr. Borges led a hermetic, unworldly life. Seemingly fragile in his last years, he relied increasingly on assistants to read to him and to write what he dictated.

“To me, reading has been a way of living,” he once said. “I think the only possible fate for me was a literary life. I can’t think of myself in a bookless world.”

At the age of 68, Mr. Borges married a childhood sweetheart, Elsa Astete Millan, but they divorced three years later. A few weeks ago he married Maria Kodama, his secretary and longtime traveling companion.

In later life, Mr. Borges was less happy than he had been with Argentina and its capital. “Buenos Aires is a dreary city now,” he said in 1982. “I don’t understand my own country. But the world is not meant to be understood by men. Every night, I dream. I have nightmares—of being lost, of being in an unknown city. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, or I can’t find my way home in Buenos Aires. Maybe I feel very lost because the world is meaningless.”

Yet Mr. Borges found meaning in his own work. “Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people,” he once wrote. “Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”

JAMES BALDWIN

August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987

By Lee Daniels

James Baldwin, whose passionate, intensely personal essays in the 1950’s and 60’s on racial discrimination in America helped break down the nation’s color barrier, died of cancer last night at his home in southern France. He was 63 years old.

At least in the early years of his career, Mr. Baldwin saw himself primarily as a novelist. But it is his essays that arguably constitute his most substantial contribution to literature.

Mr. Baldwin published his three most important collections of essays—“Notes of a Native Son” (1955), “Nobody Knows My Name” (1961) and “The Fire Next Time” (1963)—during the years the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South.

Some critics said his language was sometimes too elliptical, his indictments too sweeping. But Mr. Baldwin’s prose, with its apocalyptic tone—a legacy of his early exposure to religious fundamentalism—and its passionate sense of advocacy, seemed perfect for a period in which blacks in the South lived under continual threat of racial violence and civil rights workers often faced brutal beatings and even death.

Mr. Baldwin had moved to France in the late 1940’s to escape what he felt was the stifling racial bigotry of America. Nonetheless, although France remained his permanent residence, Mr. Baldwin in later years described himself as a “commuter” rather than an expatriate.

“Only white Americans can consider themselves to be expatriates,” he said. “Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both.”

Despite the prominent role he played in the civil rights movement in the early 1960’s, Mr. Baldwin rejected the labels of “leader” or “spokesman.” Instead, he described himself as one whose mission was to “bear witness to the truth.”

“A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others,” he told Julius Lester, a faculty colleague at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an interview in 1984. “I never assumed that I could. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that no society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society.”

This sense of independence was an intrinsic part of Mr. Baldwin’s personality.

“I was a maverick, a maverick in the sense that I depended on neither the white world nor the black world,” he told Mr. Lester. “That was the only way I could’ve played it. I would’ve been broken otherwise. I had to say, ‘A curse on both your houses.’ The fact that I went to Europe so early is probably what saved me. It gave me another touchstone—myself.”

Mr. Baldwin did not limit his “bearing witness” to racial matters. He opposed American military involvement in Vietnam as early as 1963, and in the early 1960’s he began to criticize discrimination against homosexuals.

Mr. Baldwin’s literary achievements and his activism made him a world figure and brought him many honors. Yet, Mr. Baldwin was also clearly disappointed that, despite his undeniable powers as an essayist, his novels and plays drew decidedly mixed reviews.

“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” his first book and first novel, published in 1953, was widely praised. Partly autobiographical, it tells of a poor boy growing up in Harlem in the 1930’s under the tyranny of his father, an autocratic preacher who hated his son.

Mr. Baldwin said in 1985 that in many ways the book remained the keystone of his career.

“‘Mountain’ is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,” he remarked. “I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father. He was my model. I learned a lot from him. Nobody’s ever frightened me since.”

But the reception accorded his other works was at best lukewarm, and his frank discussion of homosexuality in “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) and in “Another Country” (1962) drew criticism from within and outside the civil rights movement. In a celebrated polemic in the late 1960’s, Eldridge Cleaver, then a member of the Black Panther Party, asserted that the novel illustrated Mr. Baldwin’s “agonizing, total hatred of blacks.”

Another assessment of Mr. Baldwin was offered by the poet Langston Hughes, who observed, “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is in arousing emotion in fiction.”

Mr. Baldwin’s other works included the novel “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” the stage plays “Blues for Mr. Charlie” and “The Amen Corner,” and “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” an essay on the murder of 28 black children in Atlanta in 1980 and 1981.

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He was a precocious writer, and by his early 20s was publishing reviews and essays in The New Leader, The Nation, Commentary and Partisan Review, and socializing with the circle of New York writers and intellectuals that included Randall Jarrell, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz and Irving Howe.

Yet Mr. Baldwin was among the last persons one would have initially marked for a leadership role in a national movement. Slight and soft-spoken, he long thought of himself as ugly, and wrote poignantly of his struggle to accept the way he looked.

SAMUEL BECKETT

April 13, 1906–December 22, 1989

By Mel Gussow

Samuel Beckett, a towering figure in drama and fiction who altered the course of contemporary theater, died on Friday at the age of 83.

He died of respiratory problems in a Paris hospital, and was buried yesterday at the Montparnasse cemetery after a private funeral.

Explaining the secrecy surrounding his hospitalization and death, Irene Lindon, representing the author’s Paris publisher, Editions de Minuit, said it was “what he would have wanted.”

Beckett’s plays became the cornerstone of 20th-century theater, beginning with “Waiting for Godot,” first produced in 1953. As the play’s two tramps wait for a salvation that never comes, they exchange vaudeville routines and metaphysical musings—and comedy rises to tragedy.

Before Beckett there was a naturalistic tradition. After him, scores of playwrights were encouraged to experiment with the underlying meaning of their work as well as with an absurdist style. As the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn wrote: “After ‘Godot,’ plots could be minimal; exposition, expendable; characters, contradictory; settings, unlocalized, and dialogue, unpredictable. Blatant farce could jostle tragedy.”

At the same time, Beckett’s novels, particularly his trilogy, “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable,” inspired by James Joyce, move subliminally into the minds of the characters. The novels are among the most experimental and most profound in Western literature.

For his accomplishments in drama and fiction, the Irish author, who wrote first in English and later in French, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man’s relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism, as illustrated by the final words of his novel, “The Unnamable”: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Or as he wrote in “Worstward Ho,” one of his later works of fiction: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Though the word Beckettian entered the English language as a synonym for bleakness, Beckett was a man of great humor and compassion, in his life as in his work. He was a tragicomic playwright whose art was consistently instilled with mordant wit. Scholars and critics scrutinized his writing for metaphor and ulterior meaning, but he refrained from analysis or even explanation.

As he wrote to his favorite director, Alan Schneider: “If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.” When Mr. Schneider asked Beckett who Godot was, the playwright answered, “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.”

His greatest successes were in his middle years, in the 1950’s with “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” and with his trilogy of novels. It was suggested that for an artist of his stature, he had a relatively small body of work, but only if one measures size by number of words. Distilling his art to its essence, he produced scores of eloquent plays and stories, many of those in his later years not strictly defined as full length. But in terms of the intensity of the imagery, plays like “Not I,” “Footfalls” and “Rockaby” were complete visions.

He wrote six novels, four long plays and dozens of shorter ones, volumes of stories and narrative fragments, some of which were short novels. He wrote poetry and essays on the arts, radio and television plays, and prose pieces he called residua and disjecta.

Despite his artistic reputation, his ascension was slow and for many years discouraging. When his work began to be published and produced, he was plagued by philistinism, especially with “Waiting for Godot,” which puzzled and outraged many theatergoers and critics, some of whom regarded it as a travesty if not a hoax.

From the first he had his ardent supporters, who included, notably, Jean Anouilh, the bellwether of French theatrical tradition. Anouilh greeted “Godot” at its premiere in Paris as “a masterpiece that will cause despair for men in general and for playwrights in particular.” In both respects, he proved prescient.

Today “Godot” is generally accepted as a cornerstone of modern theater. It is performed worldwide in schools and prisons as well as on public stages. With “Godot” and his other plays, Beckett influenced countless playwrights who followed him, including Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet.

The name “Godot” is part of international mythology. Godot, who may or may not be a savior, never arrives, but man keeps waiting for his possible arrival. For Beckett himself, waiting became a way of living—waiting for inspiration, recognition, understanding or death.

For more than 50 years the writer lived in his adopted city of Paris, for much of that time in a working-class district in Montparnasse. Though he wrote most of his work in French, he remained definably Irish in his voice, manner and humor. In no way could he be considered an optimist. In an often repeated story, on a glorious sunny day he walked jauntily through a London park with an old friend and exuded a feeling of joy. The friend said it was the kind of day that made one glad to be alive. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Beckett responded.

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, on April 13, 1906. (That date is sometimes disputed.) His father, William Beckett Jr., was a surveyor. His mother, Mary Roe Beckett, had been a nurse.

Samuel and his older brother, Frank, were brought up as Protestants. They went to Earlsfort House School in Dublin. Samuel then continued his education at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and at Trinity College, Dublin. At school he excelled in both his studies and sports. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927 and his Master of Arts degree in 1931.

In the intervening time, he spent two years in Paris in an exchange program. In Paris, he met James Joyce and other members of the literary and artistic set. He became a close friend and aide to Joyce, reading to him when his eyes began to fail.

Returning to Ireland, Beckett taught Romance languages at Trinity but resigned in 1932 and left Ireland, moving permanently to Paris in 1937. By that time he had published “More Pricks Than Kicks,” a collection of short stories; “Echo’s Bones,” a volume of poetry, and “Murphy,” his first novel.

In Paris, Beckett became a familiar figure at Left Bank cafes, continuing his alliance with Joyce while also becoming friends with artists like Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti.

With a young piano student named Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he met in 1938 and would marry in 1961, he chose to remain in France during World War II rather than return to the safety of Ireland. The couple became active in the French Resistance, and when forced to flee Paris, went to Roussillon near the Spanish border. While working as a farm laborer and running messages for the Resistance, Beckett wrote the novel “Watt.” It was often said that his experiences in hiding during the war were an inspiration for “Waiting for Godot.”

After “Watt,” he began writing in French, which allowed him, as the Joyce biographer Richard Ellman observed, “a private liberation from the English tradition.”

The five years starting in 1947 were his most creative period. In a little more than a year he finished “Waiting for Godot,” his greatest play, as well as the first two parts of his trilogy of novels, “Molloy” and “Malone Dies.”

Though he found a publisher for the trilogy (Jerome Lindon at Editions de Minuit, who remained his French publisher for the rest of his life), the plays were more difficult to place. Then Roger Blin, the French actor and director, agreed to present one. He chose “Godot” over “Eleutheria,” Beckett’s first play, partly because it had fewer characters. Only when “Waiting for Godot” was in rehearsal, with Beckett in attendance, did Blin fully realize the excitement of his discovery.

“En Attendant Godot,” as the play was titled, opened on Jan. 5, 1953, at the Theatre de Babylone. The first review, written by Sylvain Zegel in La Liberation, said Beckett was “one of today’s best playwrights,” a fact that was not universally acknowledged. The first London production, using the playwright’s English translation and directed by Peter Hall, received generally dismissive daily reviews. It was rescued by Harold Hobson, then the drama critic of The Sunday Times in London, who said the play might “securely lodge in a corner of your mind as long as you live.”

In January 1956, Michael Myerberg opened the first United States production at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, with Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell as the Beckett tramps Estragon and Vladimir. Expecting a Bert Lahr comedy, the audience was mystified. As Alan Schneider, the director of that original production, said, doing “Godot” in Miami was like dancing “Giselle” in Roseland. With both the director and Mr. Ewell replaced, the play moved to Broadway in April. Most critics were confounded. Several were abusive. The play closed after 59 performances.

That “Waiting for Godot” became a contemporary classic can be attributed to the enthusiasm of its champions and the profundity of the work itself. “Godot” came to be regarded not only as a clown comedy with tragic dimensions but as a play about man coping with the nature of his existence in a world that appeared to be hurtling toward a self-induced apocalypse.

Before “Godot” was produced in London, Beckett completed a second play, “Fin de Partie,” or “Endgame,” as the title was translated. In this dramatic equivalent of chess, Hamm the master oppresses Clov the servant in a bunker looking out on the void of the world. “Endgame” was followed by the radio play “All That Fall” and by the monodrama “Krapp’s Last Tape.”

In 1961 after Beckett and Miss Deschevaux-Dumesnil were married, he finished “Happy Days,” about a long and not always happy marriage, in which a woman is buried up to her neck in earth.

In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work that “has transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation.”

He continued to write and to maintain his privacy. His plays and prose became shorter and even terser, as in “Not I,” in which the play’s principal character is a woman’s heavily lipsticked mouth; “That Time,” in which a spotlight shines on a man’s head and his corona of white hair, and “Rockaby,” in which an old woman rocks herself to death. Two of his prose pieces, “Company” and “Worstward Ho,” were published as short novels.

On July 17 this year, Beckett’s wife died. There are no immediate survivors.

About a year ago, he moved to a nursing home, where he continued to receive visitors, and he lived his last year in a small, barely furnished room.

THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL

March 2, 1904–September 24, 1991

By Eric Pace

Theodor Seuss Geisel, the author and illustrator whose whimsical fantasies written under the pen name Dr. Seuss entertained and instructed millions of children and adults around the world, died in his sleep on Tuesday night at his home in La Jolla, Calif. He was 87 years old.

“We’ve lost the finest talent in the history of children’s books,” Jerry Harrison, who oversees children’s books for Random House, Mr. Geisel’s longtime publishers, said, “and we’ll probably never see one like him again.”

Mr. Geisel’s work delighted children by combining the ridiculous and the logical, generally with a homely moral. “If I start out with the concept of a two-headed animal,” he once said, “I must put two hats on his head and two toothbrushes in the bathroom. It’s logical insanity.”

Mr. Geisel’s first book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” appeared in 1937. It was followed by such classics as “Horton Hatches the Egg” in 1940 and “The Cat in the Hat” in 1957.

Over the years, zany animal characters were the Dr. Seuss trademarks. There was “Yertle the Tertle” (1958), “Fox in Socks” (1965), “Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?” (1970) and others too improbable to mention.

But the archetypal Seuss hero, many connoisseurs felt, was Horton, a conscientious pachyderm who was duped by a lazy bird into sitting on her egg. Horton stuck to the job for many weeks, despite dreadful weather and other harassments, saying, “I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant’s faithful 100 percent.” His virtue was finally rewarded when the egg hatched and out came a creature with a bird’s wings and an elephant’s head.

Mr. Geisel won the hearts and minds of children “by the sneaky stratagem of making them laugh,” Richard R. Lingeman wrote in a review in The New York Times. He also charmed adults, especially with “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!,” a 1990 book he wrote for adult readers as well as children, which has been on the Times best-seller list for 79 weeks. Sales of books by Mr. Geisel totaled well over 200 million copies. His books have been translated into 20 languages.

In 1984, he won a special Pulitzer citation “for his contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America’s children and their parents.”

Mr. Geisel—pronounced GUYS-ell—was also the founder and a longtime executive of Beginner Books, a publishing concern bought by Random House.

Mr. Geisel began using his middle name as a pen name for his cartoons because he hoped to use his surname as a novelist one day. But when he got around to doing a grown-up book—“The Seven Lady Godivas” in 1939—the grown-ups did not seem to want to buy his humor, and he went back to writing for children, becoming famous and wealthy.

“I’d rather write for kids,” he later explained. “They’re more appreciative; adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them.”

When Mr. Geisel was interested or amused, which was very often, his eyes would light up with boyish warmth. With his lank hair, beaky nose and neat bow ties, he looked rather like the college professor he had originally set out to be. Though he never earned a doctorate, his alma mater, Dartmouth College, gave him an honorary one.

The world of Mr. Geisel’s imagination was nourished by his childhood visits to the zoo in Springfield, Mass. He was born in Springfield on March 4, 1904, the son of Theodor R. Geisel, the Superintendent of Parks, and Henrietta Seuss Geisel. Superintendent Geisel, son of an émigré German cavalry officer who founded a brewery in Springfield, expanded the zoo and liked to show it off to his son.

“I used to hang around there a lot,” Mr. Geisel recalled in an interview. “They’d let me in the cage with the small lions and the small tigers, and I got chewed up every once in a while.”

After graduating from high school, he majored in English at Dartmouth, where he contributed cartoons to the campus humor magazine, Jack-O-Lantern, and became its editor. He graduated with a B.A. in 1925. Then followed a year of graduate work in English literature at Lincoln College of Oxford University, after which he spent a year traveling in Europe.

In 1927, Mr. Geisel married Helen Marion Palmer of Orange, N.J., a teacher he had met when they were studying at Oxford. She persuaded him to give up thoughts of teaching and make drawing a career.

“Ted’s notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals,” she later recalled. “So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that.”

In addition to serving as her husband’s business manager and helping edit his books, she wrote children’s books under her maiden name.

Mr. Geisel began contributing humorous material to Vanity Fair, Liberty, Judge and other magazines. But when he first became famous, it was for drawing the “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” insecticide advertisements.

Mr. Geisel also wrote for the movies. His documentary films “Hitler Lives” and “Design for Death” won Academy Awards in 1946 and 1947, and his cartoon short “Gerald McBoing-Boing” won an Oscar in 1951. He also designed and produced cartoons for television, including the Peabody Award–winning “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Horton Hears a Who!”

Among his later books were some on serious topics. In “The Butter Battle Book” (1984), he introduced young readers to the dangers of the nuclear arms race. In 1986, in “You’re Only Old Once!,” he addressed the problems of old age in a book for grown-ups. Edward Sorel, writing in The Times Book Review, said the book was illustrated with Mr. Geisel’s “characteristic verve and imagination.” But, he added, “there’s something amiss in the blithe assumption that the sort of rhymes which delight a 4-year-old (or an adult reading to a 4-year-old) will still entertain when read alone through bifocals.”

Admirers of Mr. Geisel said the universality of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!,” which addresses the difficulties of finding one’s way through life, accounted for its success last year. The book quickly became a popular graduation present, and more than a million copies are said to have been sold.

Helen Palmer Geisel died in 1967. She and Mr. Geisel had no children. In 1968, Mr. Geisel married Audrey Stone Dimond, who survives him.

RALPH ELLISON

March 1, 1913–April 16, 1994

By Richard D. Lyons

Ralph Ellison, whose widely read novel “Invisible Man” was a stark account of racial alienation that foreshadowed the attention Americans eventually paid to divisions in their midst, died yesterday in his apartment on Riverside Drive. He was 80.

The cause was pancreatic cancer.

“Invisible Man,” which was written over a seven-year period and published by Random House in 1952, is a chronicle of a young black man’s awakening to racial discrimination and his battle against the refusal of Americans to see him apart from his ethnic background, which in turn leads to humiliation and disillusionment.

“Invisible Man” has been viewed as one of the most important works of fiction in the 20th century, has been read by millions, influenced dozens of younger writers and established Mr. Ellison as a major American writer.

Mr. Ellison’s short stories, essays, reviews and criticisms have also been widely published over the years; one collection was printed by Random House in 1964 under the title “Shadow and Act.” The second and last collection, “Going to the Territory,” came out in 1986.

Yet Mr. Ellison’s long-awaited second novel proved to be a struggle and has yet to emerge.

His editor, Mr. Fox, said yesterday that the second novel “does exist.”

“It is very long, I don’t know the name, but it is not a sequel to ‘Invisible Man,’” Mr. Fox said. “The book was started in the late 1950’s. The initial work on the book was destroyed in a fire in his home upstate, and that was so devastating that he did not resume work on it for several years.

“Just recently Ralph told me that I would be getting the book soon, and I know that he had been working on it every day, but that he was having trouble with what he termed ‘transitions.’”

“Invisible Man” was almost instantly acclaimed as the work of a major new author. It remained on the bestseller lists for 16 weeks, and millions of copies have been printed.

The book is the story of an unnamed, idealistic young black man growing up in a segregated community in the South, attending a Negro college and moving to New York to become involved in civil rights issues only to retreat, amid confusion and violence, into invisibility.

Hundreds of thousands of readers have felt themselves tingle to the flatly stated passion of the book’s opening lines:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…”

And 572 pages later the unnamed narrator was to evolve into the spokesman for all races when he asks in the book’s last line: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

The author was born in Oklahoma City. His full name was Ralph Waldo Ellison, for the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mr. Ellison was the son of Lewis Ellison, a vendor of ice and coal who died accidentally when the boy was only three years old. He was raised by his mother, Ida, who worked as a domestic. “Invisible Man” is dedicated to her, and Mr. Ellison attributed his activist streak to a mother who had recruited black votes for the Socialist Party.

Mr. Ellison began playing the trumpet at age eight, played in his high school band and knew blues singer Jimmy Rushing and trumpeter Hot Lips Page. Also drawn to writing, Mr. Ellison was to say later that his early exposure to the works of Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot impressed him deeply and that he began to connect such writing with his experiences “within the Negro communities in which I grew up.”

However, his environment was not segregated. Mr. Ellison was to recall years later that, in the Oklahoma City society of that time, his parents “had many white friends who came to the house when I was quite small, so that any feelings of distrust I was to develop toward whites later on were modified by those with whom I had warm relations.”

He studied classical composition at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he reached by riding freight trains. He stayed at Tuskegee from 1933 to 1936, before moving to New York, where he worked with the Federal Writers Project.

During a stay in Harlem during his junior year in college, Mr. Ellison met the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist Richard Wright, who several years later published “Native Son.”

Mr. Wright, six years older than Mr. Ellison, became a friend. Mr. Wright encouraged him to persevere with writing, and short stories followed, including, in 1944, “King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home.”

During World War II, Mr. Ellison served in the Merchant Marine as a cook, and became ill from his ship’s contaminated water supply. At the end of hostilities, he visited a friend in Vermont and one day typed, “I am an invisible man,” and the novel started. He recalled later, however, he didn’t know what those words represented at the start, and had no idea what had inspired the idea.

Yet the words and the ideas were to strike a resonant chord among the public, but also among American intellectuals. Over the years such authors as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller have credited Mr. Ellison with having influenced them.

Saul Bellow hailed “what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr. Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries… (the tone) is tragicomic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence.”

Mr. Ellison was to teach creative writing at New York University, while also serving as a visiting scholar at many other institutions such as the University of Chicago, Rutgers University and Yale University.

He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Fanny, and a brother, Herbert.

Mr. Fox said a small funeral service would be held early next week and that a memorial service would be held at a later date.

EUDORA WELTY

April 13, 1909–July 23, 2001

By Albin Krebs

Eudora Welty, whose evocative short stories, notable for their imagery, sharp dialogue and fierce wit, made her a revered figure in contemporary American letters, died yesterday at a hospital near her home in Jackson, Miss. She was 92.

Miss Welty was plagued by health problems and had been confined to her home, where she had lived since high school and where she wrote most of her stories, novels, essays and memoirs.

As a short-story master, Miss Welty is often mentioned by critics in the same breath as [Anton] Chekhov, but she was dismissed early in her career as a regionalist and earned widespread critical respect only when she was no longer young. When recognition came, she accepted it with the modesty and grace that had become her hallmarks.

She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel “The Optimist’s Daughter.” She also received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award and several O. Henry Awards.

In 1998 Miss Welty said she was “excited and delighted” to learn that she had become the first living writer to be included in the prestigious Library of America series of collected works by United States literary giants. The library’s break with its long tradition of choosing only dead authors for its series of definitive collections ushered Miss Welty into a pantheon that includes Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James and William Faulkner.

For decades she was pigeonholed by critics who placed her with Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers as a writer of the so-called Southern School. But her work, like that of those other Southern writers, possessed a universal relevance and appeal.

“It is not the South we find in her stories, it is Eudora Welty’s South, a region that feeds her imagination and a place we come to trust,” Maureen Howard said when she reviewed Miss Welty’s “Collected Stories” in 1980. “She is a Southerner as Chekhov was a Russian, because place provides them with a reality—a reality as difficult, mysterious and impermanent as life.”

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and the former Chestina Andrews. The Weltys settled in Jackson shortly after their marriage, and Mr. Welty became an executive in a life insurance company.

The Weltys were devoted to books and learning. In a memoir, “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Miss Welty recalled the exhilaration she felt when she fell under the spell of books.

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass,” she wrote. “Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.”

Miss Welty learned to read before starting school and began turning out stories as a child, discovering them in daily life.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories,” she wrote in 1984. “Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

In 1929 Miss Welty earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin. After college she told her parents that she wanted to be a writer, but her father insisted that she “learn something to fall back on” to support herself, so she took advertising courses at the Columbia University School of Business.

During the Depression she got a publicity job at the Works Progress Administration, which enabled her to travel throughout Mississippi. She was troubled and fascinated by the people she saw and took hundreds of snapshots.

The pictures were exhibited in New York in 1936, the same year that Miss Welty, who had sent dozens of unsolicited stories to magazines, made her first sale. A small literary magazine called Manuscript accepted “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” the recounting of the last day in the life of a lonely, ill and frightened shoe salesman who loses his way in rural Mississippi. Before he dies of a heart attack, he realizes how little he has understood about himself and others.

Miss Welty began to attract attention after The Atlantic Monthly published two of her stories destined to become classics: “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “A Worn Path.” The first is a first-person explanation by a small-town postmistress of why she is moving out of her eccentric family’s home to live at the post office. The second won Miss Welty her first of eight O. Henry Awards.

Early admirers of her short stories pressed Miss Welty to try her hand at a novel, but she resisted for several years. Her first hardcover book was a 1941 short-story collection, “A Curtain of Green.” Its 17 stories became widely known and valued through their inclusion in anthologies and textbooks.

The editor and critic James Olney said of “A Curtain of Green”: “The volume’s tonal variety is astonishing: from the somber ‘Death of a Traveling Salesman’ to the hallucinatory ‘Flowers for Marjorie,’ from the wonderment at the variety of human faces of ‘Clytie’ to the foreboding near-violence of the title piece, from the jazzy ‘Powerhouse’ to the satiric ‘Petrified Man,’ from the wildly comic ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ to the dignified ‘A Worn Path’ (the ‘grave, persistent, meditative’ sound of old Phoenix Jackson’s cane tapping the frozen earth establishes the tone at the outset).”

“Why I Live at the P.O.” combined Miss Welty’s antic sense of humor with her pleasure in language. As the narrator prepares to leave her family’s home, she says: “So I hope to tell you I marched in and got the radio. And they could of all bit a nail in two, especially Stella-Rondo, that it used to belong to, and she well knew she couldn’t get it back, I’d sue for it like a shot… The thermometer and the Hawaiian ukulele were certainly mine, and I stood on the stepladder and got all my watermelon-rind preserves and every fruit and vegetable I put up, every jar.”

In 1941 Miss Welty followed “A Curtain of Green” with “The Wide Net and Other Stories,” and in 1942 she published the novella “The Robber Bridegroom.” Her first full-length novel, “Delta Wedding,” appeared in 1946.

Three years later, a group of stories set in Morgana, an imaginary small town on the Mississippi Delta, was published under the title “The Golden Apples.” All of Miss Welty’s gifts for compression, metaphorical language and poetic structure were on display, as was her genius for using the details of daily life to illuminate the mysteries of the heart.

During World War II, Miss Welty was briefly on the staff of The New York Times Book Review. But she returned to Jackson during the 1950’s, when her mother and brothers fell seriously ill. For almost 15 years she published just a few short stories, some book reviews and a children’s book, “The Shoe Bird.” During this period she cared for her family and worked on two novels. After the deaths of her mother and brothers, she returned in the 70’s with the novels “Losing Battles” and “The Optimist’s Daughter.”

“Delta Wedding,” along with the short novel “The Ponder Heart” and her longest one, “Losing Battles,” are examples of Miss Welty’s preoccupation with family life. They focus on weddings, reunions and funerals, which all bring family members together to recall the past, criticize and praise one another and settle old scores.

Her novels and stories expose the foibles to which large clans are prone, their tendencies to resist change, squelch individuality and ostracize outsiders. In “The Ponder Heart” she demonstrates her extraordinary ear for dialect and a sense of the ridiculous as she tells the entire story as a comic monologue by a garrulous hotel manager.

Commenting on many critics’ observations that her works carried a strong sense of place, Miss Welty said: “I think Southerners have such an intimate sense of place. We grew up in the fact that we live here with people about whom we know almost everything that can be known as a citizen of the same neighborhood or town. We learn significant things that way.”

And because she was in her particular place in the racially discordant 60’s, she said, “I was one of the writers who received dead-of-night telephone calls, when I was harangued by strangers saying, ‘Why are you sitting down there writing your stories instead of out condemning your society?’”

“I didn’t need their pointers to know that there was injustice among human beings or that there was trouble,” she continued. “I had been writing about that steadily right along, by letting my characters show this. I see as my privilege writing about human beings as human beings with all the things that make them up, including bigotry, misunderstanding, injustice and also love and affection and whatever else. Whatever else makes them up interests me.”

Miss Welty, who leaves no survivors, made one notable exception to her rule against direct crusading when Medgar Evers, the black civil rights leader, was shot to death by a sniper in Jackson in 1963.

“I did write a story the night it happened,” she said. “I was so upset about this, and I thought: I live down here where this happened and I believe I must know what a person like that felt like—the murderer. There had been so many stories about such a character in the stock manner, written by people who didn’t know the South, so I wrote about the murderer intimately—in the first person, which was a very daring thing for me to do.”

The story, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” was rushed into print in The New Yorker days after Evers’s killer was arrested and represented a chilling journey into the mind of a bigoted psychopath.

ARTHUR MILLER

October 17, 1915–February 10, 2005

By Marilyn Berger

Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure.

The author of “Death of a Salesman,” a landmark of 20th-century drama, Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life, including a brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee.

“Death of a Salesman,” which opened on Broadway in 1949, established Mr. Miller as a giant of the American theater when he was only 33. It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Tony.

But the play’s enormous success also overshadowed Mr. Miller’s long career. “The Crucible,” a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired by his hatred of McCarthyism, and “A View from the Bridge,” a 1955 drama of obsession and betrayal, ultimately took their place as classics of the international stage, but Mr. Miller’s later plays never equaled his early successes. Although he wrote 17 plays, “The Price,” produced on Broadway during the 1967–68 season, was his last solid hit.

Mr. Miller also wrote successfully in other media. He supplied the screenplay for “The Misfits,” a 1961 movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was married at the time. He also wrote an autobiography, “Timebends: A Life.”

But his reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas of guilt, betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived. These dramas of social conscience were drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he believed had a more profound impact on the nation than any other except, possibly, the Civil War.

“In play after play,” the drama critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times, “he holds man responsible for his and for his neighbor’s actions.”

Elia Kazan, who directed “All My Sons,” “Death of a Salesman” and “After the Fall,” recalled in an interview, “In the 30’s and 40’s, we came out of the Group Theater tradition that every play should teach a lesson and make a thematic point.”

Mr. Miller, a lanky, wiry man, retained the appearance of a 1930’s intellectual whether he was wearing work boots and jeans while fixing his porch or seated at his word processor.

Writing plays was for him, he said, like breathing. He wrote in “Timebends” that when he was young, he “imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do.” He saw plays as a way to change America, and, as he put it, “that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.”

He had known hard work firsthand in an auto-parts warehouse during the Depression and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. But Mr. Miller called playwriting the hardest work of all.

“A playwright lives in an occupied country,” he said. “He’s the enemy. And if you can’t live like that, you don’t stay. It’s tough. He’s got to be able to take a whack, and he’s got to swallow bicycles and digest them.”

What Mr. Miller could not swallow was critics. At one moment he was hailed as the greatest living playwright and at another as a has-been. Even at the height of his success, Mr. Miller’s work received harsh criticism from prominent critics.

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer and so prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment overlooking Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment district. For a child, Mr. Miller recalled, life unfolded as “a kind of scroll whose message was surprise and mostly good news.”

The Depression changed everything for the family and became a theme that etched its way through Arthur Miller plays, from “Death of a Salesman” and “The Price” to “After the Fall,” “The American Clock” and “A Memory of Two Mondays.” The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move to reduced circumstances in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the teenage Arthur worked as a bakery delivery boy.

He graduated from high school in 1932, and then went to work in an auto-parts warehouse to earn money for his first year of college. Mr. Miller knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted to be a writer.

He went to the University of Michigan with the hope of writing a play good enough to win the school’s Avery Hopwood Award, which carried a prize of $250, enough for a second year at college. He did not win the first year, but scraped together enough money to go back to school. He went on to win two Hopwood Awards as well as a $1,250 Bureau of New Plays Award from the Theater Guild.

Within two years of graduating, Mr. Miller had written six plays, all of them rejected by producers except “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” which lasted only four performances on Broadway.

In 1940 he married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he had two children. To support his family he worked in the navy yard and took a final shot at playwriting.

“I laid myself a wager,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms.”

That play was “All My Sons,” which Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times drama critic, called “an honest, forceful drama about a group of people caught up in a monstrous swindle that has caused the death of 21 Army pilots because of defectively manufactured cylinder heads.” It won two Tony Awards.

In 1949 Willy Loman, riding on “a smile and a shoeshine” and determined to be not just liked but well liked, made his way into American consciousness in “Death of a Salesman.”

Acclaimed as a modern American masterpiece and translated into 29 languages, “Salesman” was no sooner a major success of the Broadway stage than it was savaged in intellectual journals as melodrama or Marxist propaganda. Nonetheless, “Death of a Salesman” stunned audiences. Atkinson called it “a rare event in the theater.”

Lines from the play became hallmarks of the postwar era. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” Willy bellowed, pleading with his young boss to keep his job. “A man is not a piece of fruit.” Willy’s careworn wife spoke for the inherent dignity of her husband’s life, providing a stirring refutation of the cruelties of America’s capitalist culture: “Attention must be paid.”

In 1950, Mr. Miller wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s drama “An Enemy of the People.” This 19th-century play, whose hero resisted pressure to conform to the ideology of the day, resonated in the McCarthyite climate of the mid-20th century.

“An Enemy of the People,” in philosophy at least, served as a forerunner of “The Crucible,” a dramatization of the Salem witch hunt of the 17th century that implicitly articulated Mr. Miller’s outrage at McCarthyism. He once recalled that at one performance of “The Crucible,” upon the execution of the leading character, John Proctor, people “stood up and remained silent for a couple of minutes” because “the Rosenbergs were at that moment being electrocuted in Sing Sing.”

Mr. Miller said that when he wrote “The Crucible,” he hoped it would be seen as an affirmation for keeping one’s own conscience.

“The Crucible” was also the occasion of Mr. Miller’s explosive rift with Kazan, the director of his greatest successes. Kazan’s decision to name names at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing incensed Mr. Miller, and the play was seen by some as a personal rebuke. Bypassing Kazan for the project, Mr. Miller turned to the director Jed Harris.

Mr. Harris’s production was not well received. Nevertheless, the play won Mr. Miller another Tony Award in 1953 and became his most frequently produced work.

In 1956, Mr. Miller was himself called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was applauded in Hollywood and theater circles when he refused to name names, a courageous act in an atmosphere of fear. He was cited for contempt of Congress, although he said he had never joined the Communist Party.

Of Mr. Miller’s performance before the committee, Atkinson wrote in 1957: “He refused to be an informer. He refused to turn his private conscience over to administration by the state. He has accordingly been found in contempt of Congress. That is the measure of the man who has written these high-minded plays.” Two years later, the courts dismissed the contempt citation.

He and Monroe were married in 1956, less than a month after his divorce from his wife and two years after her divorce from Joe DiMaggio.

For most of the four years of that marriage, Mr. Miller wrote almost nothing except “The Misfits,” composed as a gift to his wife, who was increasingly tormented by personal demons and drug abuse. The film had its premiere early in 1961, shortly after the couple divorced. A year later, Mr. Miller remarried, and six months after that, Monroe was found dead of a drug overdose.

“After the Fall,” his most overtly autobiographical play, brought Mr. Miller a storm of criticism when it was produced in 1964, shortly after Monroe’s death. The play, written soon after the collapse of their marriage, implies a search for understanding of her inability to cope and his failure to help her. He professed surprise when critics noted the resemblance between Monroe and Maggie, the play’s drug-addicted, blond-wigged protagonist, and accused him of defiling Monroe’s image.

“The play,” he said at the time, “is a work of fiction.” Almost no one took his explanations at face value.

But “After the Fall” did occasion Mr. Miller’s reunion with Kazan, the most insightful director of his work. It was brought about by Robert Whitehead, an architect of the plan to create an American repertory theater company as part of the new Lincoln Center complex. In his autobiography, “A Life,” Kazan wrote, “Once brought together, Art and I got along well—even though I was somewhat tense in his company, because we’d never discussed (and never did discuss) the reasons for our ‘break.’”

“After the Fall” was the inaugural production of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center. Mr. Miller contributed a second play, “Incident at Vichy,” to the following season, but it, too, was poorly received.

After his divorce from Monroe, Mr. Miller married Inge Morath, a photographer, with whom he had a daughter, Rebecca Miller, a filmmaker. She survives him, along with the children of his first marriage, a sister, four grandchildren and his companion, Agnes Barley, a painter.

In the late 1980’s, Mr. Miller reflected in an interview on the course he had taken in life. Asked how he wanted to be remembered, he did not hesitate: “I hope as a playwright. That would be all of it.”

SAUL BELLOW

June 10, 1915–April 5, 2005

By Mel Gussow and Charles McGrath

Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed historian of society whose fictional heroes—and whose scathing, unrelenting and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning—gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century, died yesterday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.

“I cannot exceed what I see,” Mr. Bellow once said. “I am bound, in other words, as the historian is bound by the period he writes about, by the situation I live in.” But his was a history of a particular and idiosyncratic sort. The center of his fictional universe was Chicago, where he grew up and spent most of his life, and which he made into the first city of American letters. Many of his works are set there, and almost all of them have a Midwestern earthiness and brashness. Like their creator, Mr. Bellow’s heroes were all head and all body both. They tended to be dreamers, questers or bookish intellectuals, but they lived in a lovingly depicted world of cranks, con men, fast-talking salesmen and wheeler-dealers.

In novels like “The Adventures of Augie March,” his breakthrough novel in 1953, “Henderson the Rain King” and “Herzog,” Mr. Bellow laid a path for old-fashioned, supersized characters and equally big themes and ideas. As the English novelist Malcolm Bradbury said, “His fame, literary, intellectual, moral, lay with his big books,” which were “filled with their big, clever, flowing prose, and their big, more-than-lifesize heroes—Augie Marches, Hendersons, Herzogs, Humboldts—who fought the battle for courage, intelligence, selfhood and a sense of human grandeur in the postwar age of expansive, materialist, high-towered Chicago-style American capitalism.”

Mr. Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of “Henderson the Rain King,” a quixotic violinist and pig farmer who vainly sought a higher truth and a moral purpose in life, was the one most like himself. But there were also elements of the author in the put-upon, twice-divorced but ever-hopeful Moses Herzog and in wise but embattled older figures like Artur Sammler, of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” and Albert Corde, the dean in “The Dean’s December.” All were men trying to come to grips with what Corde called “the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.”

All his work was written in a distinctive, immediately recognizable style that blended high and low, colloquial and mandarin, wisecrack and aphorism, as in the introduction of the poet Humboldt at the beginning of “Humboldt’s Gift”: “He was a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.”

Mr. Bellow stuck to an individualistic path, and steered clear of cliques, fads and schools of writing. He was frequently lumped together with Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud as a Jewish-American writer, but he rejected the label, saying he had no wish to be part of the “Hart, Schaffner & Marx” of American letters. He spoke his own mind, without regard for political correctness or fashion, and was often involved in fierce debates with feminists, black writers, postmodernists. On multiculturalism, he was once quoted as asking: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” The remark caused a furor and was taken as proof, he said, “that I was at best insensitive and at worst an elitist, a chauvinist, a reactionary and a racist—in a word, a monster.”

In his life as in his work, he was unpredictable. The most urban of writers, he spent much of his time at a farm in Vermont. He admired the Chicago machers—the deal-makers and real-estate men—and he dressed like one of them, in bespoke suits, Turnbull & Asser shirts and a Borsalino hat.

In a long and unusually productive career, Mr. Bellow dodged many of the snares that typically entangle American writers. He didn’t drink much, and though he was analyzed four times, his mental health was as robust as his physical health. He never stopped writing. The Nobel Prize, which he won in 1976, was the cornerstone of a career that included a Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards and more honors than any other American writer.

This most American of writers was born in Lachine, Quebec, an immigrant suburb of Montreal, and named Solomon Bellow. His birth date is listed as either June or July 10, 1915. His parents had emigrated from Russia. In Canada, Solomon’s father, Abram, failed at one enterprise after another. His mother, Liza, was deeply religious and wanted the youngest of her four children to become a rabbi or a violinist. But when at the age of eight he spent six months in the Royal Victoria Hospital, suffering from a respiratory infection and reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the funny papers, he became certain, he said, that he had discovered his destiny.

When young Soloman was nine, the Bellows moved to Chicago. During his childhood, he was steeped in Jewish tradition. But eventually he rebelled against what he considered a “suffocating orthodoxy” and found in Chicago not just a physical home but a spiritual one.

Recalling his sense of discovery and belonging, he later wrote, “The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology and doing all this in Chicago, of all places.”

Chicago became for him what Dublin was for Joyce, the center of both his life and his work and almost a character in its own right.

In 1933 Mr. Bellow began college at the University of Chicago, but two years later transferred to Northwestern. Put off by the tweedy anti-Semitism of the English department, he graduated in 1937 with honors in anthropology and sociology, subjects that would instill his novels. But he was still obsessed by fiction. While doing graduate work in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, he found that “every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story.”

Mr. Bellow came to New York “toward the end of the 30’s, muddled in the head but keen to educate myself.” He was in training with the merchant marine when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. During his service, he finished writing “Dangling Man,” about the alienation of a young Chicagoan waiting to be drafted. It was published in 1944, before the author was 30, and was followed by “The Victim,” a novel about anti-Semitism.

In 1948, Mr. Bellow went to Paris, where he had a kind of epiphany. He remembered a friend from his childhood named Chucky, “a wild talker who was always announcing cheerfully that he had a super scheme,” and he began to wonder what a novel in Chucky’s voice would sound like. “The book just came to me,” he said later. “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.” The resulting novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” was published in 1953, and it became Mr. Bellow’s breakthrough, a best seller that also established him as a writer of consequence. The beginning of the novel announced a brand-new voice in American fiction—jazzy, brash, exuberant, with accents that were both Yiddish and Whitmanian:

“I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

“Fiction is the higher autobiography,” Mr. Bellow once said, and in later novels, he often adapted facts from his own life and the lives of people he knew. Humboldt was a version of the poet Delmore Schwartz; Gersbach, the cuckolder in “Herzog,” was a Bard professor named Jack Ludwig, who seduced Mr. Bellow’s wife at the time; and in one guise or another most of Mr. Bellow’s many girlfriends turned up.

“What a woman-filled life I always led,” says Charlie Citrine, the protagonist of “Humboldt’s Gift.” Those words could have been echoed by the author, who had almost innumerable affairs and was married five times. His wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea and Janis Freedman. All but Mr. Bellow’s last marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Janis, his survivors include a daughter and three sons.

With “Henderson the Rain King” in 1959, Mr. Bellow envisioned an even more ambitious canvas than that of “Augie March,” with the story of an American millionaire who travels in Africa in search of regeneration. “Henderson” was followed in 1964 by “Herzog,” with the title character a Jewish Everyman cuckolded by his wife and his best friend. “He is taken by an epistolary fit,” said the author, “and writes grieving, biting, ironic and rambunctious letters not only to his friends and acquaintances, but also to the great men, the giants of thought, who formed his mind.” The novel won a National Book Award.

With “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” in 1969, a novel about a Holocaust survivor living in New York, Mr. Bellow won his third National Book Award. “Humboldt’s Gift,” in 1975, proved one of his greatest successes. In it, Charlie Citrine, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, must come to terms with the death of his mentor.

Life imitated art, and “Humboldt” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Nobel Prize in Literature soon followed.

His books eventually became shorter and shorter, although he returned to longer fiction in 2000 with “Ravelstein,” about a celebrated professor dying of AIDS.

In 1993 Mr. Bellow moved to Boston and began teaching at Boston University. Explaining why he continued to teach, despite his financial success, he said: “You’re all alone when you’re a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it’s much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that’s what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.”

NORMAN MAILER

January 31, 1923–November 10, 2007

By Charles McGrath

Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation, died early yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84.

The cause was acute renal failure, his family said.

Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for six decades he was rarely far from center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979).

He also wrote, directed and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair—jet black at first and ultimately snow white—made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most authors were lured out into the limelight.

At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch.

Along the way, he transformed American journalism by introducing to nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing at the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life character who was none other than Norman Mailer himself.

Norman Kingsley (or, in Hebrew, Nachem Malek) Mailer was born in Long Branch, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South African émigré and a largely ineffectual businessman.

The dominant figure in the family was Mr. Mailer’s mother, the former Fanny Schneider, who came from a vibrant clan in Long Branch, where her father ran a grocery and was the town’s unofficial rabbi.

When Norman was nine, the family moved to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. Pampered and doted on, he excelled at both Public School 161 and Boys High School, from which he graduated in 1939.

That fall, he entered Harvard as a 16-year-old. By the time he was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with literature. He spent the summer reading and rereading James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.,” and he began, or so he claimed, to set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words of his own, on the theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system.

Mr. Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943, determined on a literary career. He was called up by the Army in the spring of 1944, after marrying Bea Silverman in January, and was sent to the Philippines.

Mr. Mailer saw little combat, but his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for “The Naked and the Dead,” the book that put him on the map.

The novel is about a platoon fighting on a Pacific atoll. When it was published it was almost universally praised—the last time this would happen to him. Some critics ranked it among the best war novels ever written. It sold 200,000 copies in just three months—a huge number in those days.

His second book, “Barbary Shore” (1951), a political novel about, among other things, the struggle between capitalism and socialism, earned what Mr. Mailer called “possibly the worst reviews of any serious novel in recent years.” A third, “The Deer Park” (1955), in part a fictionalized account of Elia Kazan’s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, fared only a little better.

For much of the ’50s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both. In 1955, together with two friends, Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, he founded The Village Voice, and while writing a column for that paper he began to evolve what became his trademark style—bold, poetic, metaphysical, even shamanistic at times—and his personal philosophy of hipsterism.

The most famous, or infamous, version of this philosophy was Mr. Mailer’s controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which seemed to endorse violence as an existential act and declared the murder of a white candy-store owner by two 18-year-old blacks an example of “daring the unknown.”

In November 1960, drinking heavily at a party, Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, seriously wounding her. Mr. Mailer was arrested, but his wife declined to press charges, and he was eventually released after being sent to Bellevue Hospital for observation. The marriage broke up two years later.

All told, Mr. Mailer was married six times, counting a quickie with Carol Stevens, whom he wed and divorced within a couple of days in 1980 to grant legitimacy to their daughter, Maggie. His other wives, in addition to Ms. Silverman and Ms. Morales, were Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook; Beverly Rentz Bentley; and Norris Church, with whom he was living at his death. Lady Jeanne died in June.

In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with proponents of women’s liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an “enemy of birth control.”

He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had eight children, all of whom survive him. Also surviving are an adopted son, by an earlier marriage of Ms. Church’s, and 10 grandchildren.

For all his hipsterism, Mr. Mailer was an old-fashioned, attentive father. Starting in the 1960s, the financial burden of his offspring, as well as keeping up with his numerous alimony payments, caused him to take on freelance magazine assignments.

A series of articles for Esquire on the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions became the basis for his book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” and articles for Harper’s and Commentary about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon were the basis for the prizewinning book “The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History.”

The critic Richard Gilman said of the book: “In ‘Armies of the Night,’ the rough force of Mailer’s imagination, his brilliant wayward gifts of observation, his ravishing if often calculated honesty and his chutzpah all flourish on the steady ground of a newly coherent subject and theme.”

Somehow in this busy decade Mr. Mailer also managed to make his most famous movie, “Maidstone,” during the filming of which he bit off part of an ear of the actor Rip Torn after Mr. Torn attacked him with a hammer, and to run for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin on his ticket. They campaigned to make the city the 51st state. (The Mailer team eventually lost in the Democratic primary to Mario Procaccino, who was beaten in the election by John V. Lindsay.)

His best book, he said in an interview in 2006, was “Ancient Evenings” (1983), a long novel about ancient Egypt. About the book that many critics consider his masterpiece, “The Executioner’s Song,” he said he had mixed feelings because it wasn’t entirely his project.

The book, which is about Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer who, after a stay on death row, asked to be executed by the State of Utah in 1976, was the idea of Lawrence Schiller, a writer and filmmaker who did much of the reporting, taping Mr. Gilmore and his family.

But Mr. Mailer recast this material in what was for him a new impersonal voice that rendered the thoughts of his characters in a style partly drawn from their own way of talking. He called it a “true-life novel.”

Joan Didion, reviewing the book for The New York Times Book Review, said: “It is ambitious to the point of vertigo. It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in ‘The Executioner’s Song,’ is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature.”

Mr. Mailer was drawn to another convict. He championed Jack Henry Abbott, who was serving a long sentence in a Utah prison for forgery and for killing a fellow inmate. In 1977, Mr. Abbott began writing to Mr. Mailer. Mr. Mailer saw literary talent in Mr. Abbott’s letters and helped him publish them in an acclaimed volume called “In the Belly of the Beast.” He also lobbied to get Mr. Abbott paroled. A few weeks after being released, in June 1981, Mr. Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed to death a waiter in a Lower East Side restaurant, and his champion became a target of national outrage.

This was the last great controversy of Mr. Mailer’s career. Chastened perhaps, the former scourge of parties became a regular guest at black-tie benefits and dinners given by the likes of William S. Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt and Oscar de la Renta. His editor, Jason Epstein, said of this period, “There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has won.”

In the ’90s Mr. Mailer’s health began to fail. But his productivity was undiminished. In 1997 “The Gospel According to the Son,” a first-person novel about Jesus, was published. It gave some critics the opportunity they had been waiting for. Norman Mailer thinks he’s God, they said.

Mr. Mailer’s next novel, “The Castle in the Forest,” was about Hitler, but the narrator was a devil, a persona the author admitted he found particularly congenial. “It’s as close as a writer gets to unrequited joy,” he said. “We are devils when all is said and done.”

Interviewed at his house in Provincetown, Mass., shortly before that book’s publication, Mr. Mailer, frail but cheerful, talked of his life as a writer.

“In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years,” he said. “That’s not true for very many of us.” And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.

“I think the novel is on the way out,” he said. “I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.”

JOHN UPDIKE

March 18, 1932–January 27, 2009

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Knopf, his publisher.

Of Mr. Updike’s many novels and stories, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public more than his precisely observed tales about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings.

His best-known protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname—“Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest”—the author traces the funny, restless and questing life of this middle American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.

“My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class,” Mr. Updike said in 1966. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

From his earliest short stories, he found his subject in the everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce. He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam.

Here he is in “A Sense of Shelter,” an early short story:

“Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s.”

The detail of his writing was so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction: those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that it was more style than content.

“He is a prose writer of great beauty,” the critic James Wood wrote in 1999, “but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough.”

Astonishingly industrious and prolific, Mr. Updike turned out three pages a day of fiction, essays, criticism or verse, proving the maxim that several pages a day was at least a book a year—or more. He published 60 books in his lifetime; his final one, “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is to be published in June.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

His vast output of poetry, which tended toward light verse, and his wide-ranging essays and criticism filled volume after volume.

He never abandoned short stories, of which he turned out several hundred, most for The New Yorker. It was here that he exercised his exquisitely sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic routine and the conflicts that animated it for him—between present satisfaction and future possibility, between sex and spirituality, and between the beauty of creation and the looming threat of death.

Philip Roth, one of his literary peers, said Tuesday: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington. He was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a junior high school math teacher of Dutch descent, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who later also published fiction in The New Yorker and elsewhere.

His was a solitary childhood, but isolation fired his imagination as well as his desire to take flight from aloneness. He aspired first to be either an animator for Walt Disney or a magazine cartoonist.

After graduating from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president, Mr. Updike attended Harvard on a scholarship; he majored in English and wrote for and edited The Harvard Lampoon. In 1953 he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major.

Graduating from Harvard in 1954 summa cum laude, he won a fellowship to study art in Oxford, England. In June of that year, his short story “Friends from Philadelphia” was accepted, along with a poem, by The New Yorker. It was an event, he later said, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.”

Following the birth of his first child, Elizabeth, the couple returned to America, and Mr. Updike went to work writing Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker.

By 1959 he had completed three books—a volume of poetry; a novel, “The Poorhouse Fair”; and a collection of stories—and placed them with Alfred A. Knopf, which remained his publisher throughout his career. From 1954 to 1959, he also published more than a hundred essays, articles, poems and short stories in The New Yorker.

The Updikes settled in Ipswich, Mass., a small town north of Boston that seemed to stimulate his memories of Shillington and his creation of its fictional counterpart, Olinger. All his early stories were set there or in a neighboring city modeled on Reading, as were his first four novels, “The Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur,” “Of the Farm” and “Rabbit, Run.”

With “Couples” (1968), his fifth novel, Mr. Updike moved his setting to the fictional Tarbox, Mass. The novel, about coupling and uncoupling among young married men and women, was remarkably frank for its time, with long, detailed and often lyrical descriptions of sexual acts. It became a best seller.

With the Rabbit quartet, Mr. Updike cast his keen eye on a still wider world. “Rabbit, Run” and its three sequels, published at 10-year intervals, summon decades of American experience: the cultural turmoil of the 1960s; the boom years, oil crisis and inflation of the 70s; and what Rabbit calls “Reagan’s reign,” with its trade war with Japan, its AIDS epidemic and the terror bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

“Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” both won Pulitzer Prizes. Reissued as a set in 1995, “Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy” was pronounced by some to be a contender for the crown of great American novel.

Against the grain of his calling and temperament, Mr. Updike strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly life. He took up golf, which he played with passionate enthusiasm and a writer’s eye, observing the grace notes in others’ swings and tiny variations in the landscape.

He was a tall, handsome man with a prominent nose and a head of hair that Tom Wolfe once compared to “monkish thatch.” And though as a youth he suffered from both a stutter and psoriasis, he became a person of immense charm, unfailingly polite and gracious in public.

In 1976 the Updikes were divorced, and the following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children first in Georgetown, Mass., and then in 1984 in Beverly Farms, both towns in the same corner of the state as Ipswich.

In addition to his wife, Martha, he is survived by two sons, two daughters, three stepsons, seven grandchildren and seven step-grandchildren.

By the 1980s, with the storehouse of his youthful experience emptying and his material circumstances enriched, Mr. Updike nevertheless determined to keep publishing a book a year.

Among the dozen or more novels he brought out in the next quarter century, some clicked, like “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984), celebrated by some as an exuberant sexual comedy and a satirical view of women’s liberation. Others seemed schematic, like the author’s three takes on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”—“Roger’s Version” (1986), “S” (1988) and “A Month of Sundays” (1975)—and received lukewarm reviews.

Some readers complained about his portrayal of women. In an interview with The Times in 1988, Mr. Updike acknowledged the criticism that “my women are never on the move, that they’re always stuck where the men have put them.” His “only defense,” he said, “would be that it’s in the domesticity, the family, the sexual relations, that women interest me. I don’t write about too many male businessmen, and I’m not apt to write about too many female businessmen.”

Whatever his flaws as a novelist, his mastery of the short-story form continued to grow. Reviewing Mr. Updike’s sixth collection of stories, “Museums and Women and Other Stories” (1972), Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times, “His former preciousness has toughened into precision.”

It was in a story collection—his fifth, “Bech: A Book” (1970)—that Mr. Updike created a counter-self living a counter-life. His character Henry Bech is an unmarried, urban, blocked Jewish writer immersed in the swim of literary celebrity—“a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times,” as Bech himself put it in a later novel.

As Mr. Updike’s opposite, Bech not only writes in a voice very different from his creator’s—world-weary, full of schmerz and a touch of schmalz—he also undertakes tasks that Mr. Updike avoided, like attending literary dinners, working off grudges, murdering critics and interviewing John Updike for The New York Times Book Review.

Bech even wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, something that Mr. Updike never did, to the consternation of many Western writers and critics.

By contrasting so sharply with his creator, Henry Bech also defined Mr. Updike more distinctly, particularly his determination to stick to the essentials of his craft. As Mr. Updike told The Paris Review about his decision to shun the New York spotlight:

“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

December 11, 1918–August 3, 2008

By Michael T. Kaufman

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow.

His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.

Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.” “Gulag” was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book, which led to his expulsion from his native land, was described by George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. He returned to Russia and deplored what he considered its spiritual decline, but toward the end of his life he embraced President Vladimir V. Putin as a restorer of Russia’s greatness.

In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev’s decision to allow “Ivan Denisovich” to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin. Soon after the story appeared, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they campaigned to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as a traitor and confiscated his manuscripts.

But by then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not just to Russia’s literary giants but also to Stalin’s literary victims, like Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He rallied support among friends and artists, who turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period. Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing.

Their position was confirmed when Mr. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech, he said that while an ordinary man was obliged “not to participate in lies,” artists had greater responsibilities: “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”

By this time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, “The Gulag Archipelago.” In more than 300,000 words, it told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and even existence were subjects long considered taboo. Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm, and the book was published in Paris just after Christmas 1973. The Soviet government counterattacked with critical articles, including one in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, headlined “The Path of a Traitor.”

On Feb. 12, 1974, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and the next day he was told that he was being deprived of his citizenship and deported. Six weeks after his expulsion, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was joined by his second wife, Natalia Svetlova, and their three sons. The family eventually moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vt.

There he kept mostly to himself for some 18 years, writing and thinking a great deal about Russia and hardly at all about his new environment, so certain was he that he would return to his homeland one day.

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism.

In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.

One story, a short novel, was “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of the prisoners, peasants willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire.

The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. “Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, he had swiped some extra gruel, and he had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.

“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: “Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had once shared a cell. Mr. Kopelev realized that under Khrushchev’s policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, the Soviet Union’s prestigious literary and cultural journal. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues took the story to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor, who was able to get Khrushchev himself to read “One Day in the Life.” Khrushchev was impressed, and the novel appeared in Novy Mir in 1962.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. “One Day in the Life” changed that.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the Caucasus spa town of Kislovodsk on Dec. 11, 1918, a year after the Soviet Union arose from revolution. His father, Isaaki, had been a Russian artillery officer and was married to Taissa Shcherback. Shortly before his son’s birth, he was killed in a hunting accident.

In 1941, just before Germany attacked Russia to expand World War II into Soviet territory, Mr. Solzhenitsyn graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math. A year earlier, he had married Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist. When hostilities began, he joined the army and spent three years in combat.

In February 1945, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter in which he referred to Stalin—disrespectfully, the authorities said—as “the man with the mustache.” He was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. It was his entry into the vast network of punitive institutions that he would later name the Gulag Archipelago, after the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps.

On July 9, 1947, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was moved to a prison outside Moscow, an institution for inmates who were trained scientists and whose forced labor involved scientific research. His experiences there provided the basis for his novel “The First Circle,” which was not published outside the Soviet Union until 1968.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn tended toward outspokenness, and it soon undid him. He was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz, which would become the inspiration for “One Day in the Life.”

At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could recite it without hesitation. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had memorized 12,000 lines in this way.

On Feb. 9, 1953, his term in the camps officially ended. On March 6, he was sent farther east, arriving in Kok-Terek, a desert settlement, in time to hear the announcement of Stalin’s death. It was here that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was ordered to spend his term of “perpetual exile.”

He taught in a local school and wrote secretly. He learned he had cancer. His life as a pariah struggling with disease would lead to his novel “The Cancer Ward,” which also first appeared outside the Soviet Union, in 1969.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn recovered. In April 1956, a letter arrived informing him that his period of internal exile had been lifted. He resumed teaching and writing, reworking some of the lines he had once stored away as he fingered his beads. Then in 1962 came the publication of “One Day in the Life.”

But when Leonid I. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader in October 1964, it was apparent that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was being silenced, and his skirmishes with the state intensified. While the authorities kept him from publishing, he kept writing and speaking out, eliciting threats by mail and phone. He slept with a pitchfork beside his bed. Finally, government agents arrested him, took him to the airport and deported him.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn believed that his stay in the United States would be temporary. With that goal, he lived like a recluse in rural Vermont as he kept writing about Russia, in Russian. He devoted himself to a gigantic work of historical fiction that eventually ran to more than 5,000 pages. The work, called “The Red Wheel,” focused on the revolutionary chaos that had spawned Bolshevism and set the stage for modern Russian history.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994, and he and his family journeyed by rail across Russia to see what his post-Communist country now looked like. On the first stop, his judgment was clear. His homeland, he said, was “tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition.”

In the final years of his life, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had spoken approvingly of a “restoration” of Russia under Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin, he said in an interview, “inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible—a slow and gradual restoration.”

J. D. SALINGER

January 1, 1919–January 27, 2010

By Charles McGrath

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death.

Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young.

The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974, Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.”

Many critics preferred “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape writers like Philip Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story—the old structure of beginning, middle, end—for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony.

Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”

As a young man Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of attention. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye” and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish.

He rarely left and his publications slowed to a trickle and soon stopped completely. “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” both collections of material previously published in The New Yorker, came out in 1961 and 1963, and the last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.

He seldom spoke to the press. And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting.

In 1984 the British literary critic Ian Hamilton approached Mr. Salinger with the notion of writing his biography. Not surprisingly, Mr. Salinger turned him down, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.”

Mr. Hamilton went ahead anyway, and in 1986, Mr. Salinger took him to court to prevent the use of quotations and paraphrases from unpublished letters. The case went to the Supreme Court, and to the surprise of many, Mr. Salinger won, though not without some cost to his cherished privacy.

Mr. Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard—with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman—and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind.” Both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.

But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of real evidence, theories multiplied. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, though she had never seen them.

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day, 1919, the second of two children. His sister, Doris, who died in 2001, was for many years a buyer in the dress department at Bloomingdale’s. Like the Glasses, the Salinger children were the product of a mixed marriage. Their father, Sol, was a Jew, the son of a rabbi, but sufficiently assimilated that he made his living importing both cheese and ham. Their mother, Marie Jillisch, was of Irish descent, born in Scotland, but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws.

Never much of a student, Mr. Salinger attended the progressive McBurney School on the Upper West Side. But he flunked out and in 1934 was packed off to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pa., which became the model for Holden’s Pencey Prep.

In 1937, after a couple of unenthusiastic weeks at New York University, Mr. Salinger traveled with his father to Austria and Poland, where he was to learn the ham business. Deciding that wasn’t for him, he returned to America and drifted through a term or so at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Fellow students remember him announcing that he was going to write the Great American Novel.

Mr. Salinger’s most sustained exposure to higher education was an evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and under Mr. Burnett’s tutelage he managed to sell a story, “The Young Folks,” to Story magazine. He subsequently sold stories to Esquire, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post—formulaic work that gave little hint of real originality.

In 1941, after several rejections, Mr. Salinger finally cracked The New Yorker, the ultimate goal of any aspiring writer back then, with a story, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” that was an early sketch of what became a scene in “The Catcher in the Rye.” But the magazine then had second thoughts, apparently worried about seeming to encourage young people to run away from school, and held the story for five years before finally publishing it in 1946, buried in the back of an issue.

Meanwhile Mr. Salinger had been drafted. He served with the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose job was to interview Nazi deserters and sympathizers. On June 6, 1944, he landed at Utah Beach, and he later saw action during the Battle of the Bulge.

In 1945 he was hospitalized for “battle fatigue”—often a euphemism for a breakdown—and after recovering he stayed on in Europe past the end of the war, chasing Nazi functionaries. He married a German woman, very briefly—a doctor about whom biographers have been able to discover very little.

Back in New York, Mr. Salinger resumed his career. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” austere, mysterious and Mr. Salinger’s most famous and still most discussed story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and suggested, not wrongly, that he had become a very different kind of writer.

As a young writer Mr. Salinger was something of a ladies’ man and dated, among others, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin. In 1953 he met Claire Douglas, who was then a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore; they were married two years later. Margaret was born in 1955, and Matthew, now an actor and film producer, was born in 1960. But the marriage soon turned distant and isolating, and in 1966, Ms. Douglas sued for divorce.

The affair with Ms. Maynard, then a Yale freshman, began in 1972, after Mr. Salinger read an article she had written for The New York Times Magazine titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” They broke up after 10 months. In the late 1980s, he married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse, who is considerably younger than he is.

Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O’Neill and his daughter, Margaret, as well as three grandsons.

His literary agents said in a statement there will be no service. “Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it,” the statement said. “His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.”

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

March 6, 1927–April 17, 2014

By Jonathan Kandell

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

Mr. García Márquez was a master of the genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. Storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, he said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination.”

Mr. García Márquez viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martínez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. Readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’” But Mr. García Márquez grew to hate it, fearing that his subsequent work would not measure up.

He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927, the eldest child of Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Gabriel Elijio García. His father, a postal clerk, telegraph operator and itinerant pharmacist, could barely support his wife and 12 children; Gabriel, the eldest, spent his early childhood living in the large, ramshackle house of his maternal grandparents.

His maternal grandfather, Nicolás Márquez Mejía, a retired army colonel, was “the most important figure of my life,” Mr. García Márquez said. The grandfather bore a marked resemblance to Colonel Buendía, the protagonist of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and the book’s mythical village of Macondo draws heavily on Aracataca.

In his 2002 memoir, “Living to Tell the Tale,” Mr. García Márquez recalled a river trip back to Aracataca in 1950, his first trip there since childhood: “The first thing that struck me was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust.”

Mr. García Márquez moved to Bogotá as a teenager. He studied law there but never received a degree; he turned instead to journalism. The late 1940s and early ’50s in Colombia were a period of civil strife known as La Violencia, which became the background for several of his novels.

Mr. García Márquez eked out a living writing for newspapers in Cartagena and then Barranquilla. He scored a scoop when he interviewed a sailor who had been portrayed by the Colombian government as the heroic survivor of a navy destroyer lost at sea. The sailor admitted to him that the ship had been carrying a heavy load of contraband household goods, which unloosed during a storm and caused the ship to list. His report, in 1955, infuriated Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the country’s dictator, and the writer fled to Europe. He spent two years there as a foreign correspondent.

Mr. García Márquez was less impressed by Western Europe than many Latin American writers. Europeans, he said in his Nobel address, “insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.”

Mr. García Márquez lost his job when his newspaper was shut down by the Rojas Pinilla regime. Stranded in Paris, he scavenged and sold bottles to survive, but he managed to begin a short novel, “In Evil Hour.”

While working on that book he took time off in 1957 to complete another short novel, “No One Writes to the Colonel,” about an impoverished retired army officer, not unlike the author’s grandfather. It was published to acclaim four years later. (“In Evil Hour” was also published in the early 1960s.)

From 1959 to 1961 he supported the Castro revolution and wrote for the official Cuban press agency. In 1961 he moved to Mexico City, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life. It was there, in 1965, after a four-year dry spell, that he began “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The inspiration for it, he said, came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

Returning home, he began an almost undistracted 18 months of writing while his wife, Mercedes, looked after the household. “When I was finished writing,” he recalled, “my wife said: ‘Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.’”

With the book’s publication in 1967, in Buenos Aires, the family never owed a penny again. Besides his wife, the writer is survived by his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

In 1973, when General Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide, Mr. García Márquez vowed never to write as long as General Pinochet remained in power.

The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 years, but Mr. García Márquez released himself from his vow well before it ended. “What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship,” he said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post.

In 1975 he published his next novel, “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” about a dictator in a phantasmagorical Latin American state who rules for so many decades that nobody can recall what life was like before him. Despite mixed reviews, it became a global best seller. He called it his best novel.

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” published in 1985, was his most romantic novel, the story of the resumption of a passionate relationship between a recently widowed septuagenarian and the lover she had broken with more than 50 years before.

“The General in His Labyrinth,” published in 1989, combined imagination with historical fact to conjure up the last days of Simón Bolívar. The portrait of the aging Bolívar as a flatulent philanderer, abandoned and ridiculed by his onetime followers, aroused controversy on a continent that viewed him as South America’s version of George Washington. But Mr. García Márquez said that his depiction had been drawn from a careful perusal of Bolívar’s letters.

As his fame grew, the author enjoyed a lifestyle he would have found inconceivable in his youth. He kept homes in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

For more than three decades the State Department denied Mr. García Márquez a visa to travel in the United States, supposedly because he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s but almost certainly because of his continuing espousal of left-wing causes and his friendship with Mr. Castro. The ban was rescinded in 1995 after President Bill Clinton invited him to Martha’s Vineyard.

After receiving a diagnosis of lymphatic cancer in 1999, Mr. García Márquez devoted most of his writing to his memoirs. In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that Mr. García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing.

Cristóbal Pera, the author’s editor at Random House Mondadori, said at the time that Mr. García Márquez had been working on a novel, but that no publication date had been scheduled. Mr. Pera said the author seemed disinclined to have it published at all and had said: “This far along I don’t need to publish more.”

Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Mexico City.

MAYA ANGELOU

April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014

By Margalit Fox

Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”—a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South—was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.

In a statement, President Barack Obama called Ms. Angelou “a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” adding, “She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.”

Though her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, garnered more critical praise than her poetry did, Ms. Angelou (pronounced AHN-zhe-low) probably received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered her inaugural poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation’s 42nd president. He, like Ms. Angelou, had grown up in Arkansas.

It began:

A Rock, A River, A Tree

Hosts to species long since departed,

Marked the mastodon,

The dinosaur, who left dried tokens

Of their sojourn here

On our planet floor,

Any broad alarm of their hastening doom

Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,

Come, you may stand upon my

Back and face your distant destiny,

But seek no haven in my shadow,

I will give you no hiding place down here.

Long before that day, as she recounted in “Caged Bird” and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem; ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows, from “Oprah” to “Sesame Street”; and subject of scholarly studies.

Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. Her work offered a clear-eyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.

“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Ms. Angelou wrote in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou’s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her with almost palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” published when Ms. Angelou was in her early 40s, spans only her first 17 years. But what powerfully formative years they were.

Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. Her father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, “was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ‘personal niche,’ lost before birth and unrecovered since,” Ms. Angelou wrote. “How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.”

Her mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. As a girl, Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother’s childhood nickname for her.

After her parents’ marriage ended, three-year-old Maya was sent with her four-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father’s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, “with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.”

Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store “in the heart of the Negro area,” Ms. Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, “with her solid air packed around her like cotton,” she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

The children returned periodically to St. Louis to live with their mother. On one occasion, when Maya was seven or eight (her age varies slightly across her memoirs, which employ techniques of fiction to recount actual events), she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She told her brother, who alerted the family, and the man was tried and convicted. Before he could begin serving his sentence, he was murdered.

Believing that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Her love of literature, she later wrote, helped restore language to her.

As a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. At 16, after a casual liaison with a neighborhood youth, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. There the first book ends.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”—the title is a line from “Sympathy,” by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—became a bestseller, confounding the stereotype that black women’s lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.

The five volumes of memoir that follow were “Gather Together in My Name,” “Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas,” “The Heart of a Woman,” “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” and “A Song Flung Up to Heaven.”

They describe her struggles to support her son, Guy Johnson, through odd jobs.

“Determined to raise him, I had worked as a shake dancer in nightclubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic’s shop, taking paint off cars with my hands,” she wrote in “Singin’ and Swingin’.” Elsewhere, she described her brief stints as a prostitute and a madam.

Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married, although it appears to have been at least three.)

After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence—she was six feet tall—she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act.

Ms. Angelou later settled in New York, where she became active in the Harlem Writers Guild, sang at the Apollo and succeeded Bayard Rustin as the coordinator of the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that he, Dr. King and others had founded.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Angelou became romantically involved with Vusumzi L. Make, a South African civil rights activist. She moved with him to Cairo, and after leaving him moved to Accra, Ghana.

In 1973, Ms. Angelou appeared on Broadway in “Look Away,” a play about Mary Todd Lincoln and her seamstress. Though the play closed after one performance, Ms. Angelou was nominated for a Tony Award. On the screen, she portrayed Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the 1977 television mini-series “Roots.”

Ms. Angelou’s marriage in the 1970s to Paul du Feu, who had previously been married to the feminist writer Germaine Greer, ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Some reviewers expressed reservations about Ms. Angelou’s memoiristic style, calling it facile and solipsistic. Others criticized her poetry as being little more than prose with line breaks. But her importance as a literary, cultural and historical figure was borne out by the many laurels she received, including a spate of honorary doctorates.

She remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.

Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.

“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”

Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start tomorrow.”

HARPER LEE

April 28, 1926–February 19, 2016

By William Grimes

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became one of the most beloved works of fiction ever written by an American, died yesterday at an assisted living facility in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived. She was 89.

The instant success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, turned Ms. Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive.

“I never expected any sort of success with ‘Mockingbird,’” Ms. Lee said in 1964. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement.”

The enormous success of the film version of the novel, released in 1962 with Gregory Peck starring as Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, added to Ms. Lee’s fame and fanned expectations for her next novel.

But for more than half a century a second novel failed to turn up, and Ms. Lee gained a reputation as a literary Garbo, a recluse whose public appearances counted as news simply because of their rarity.

Then, in February 2015, long after the public had given up on seeing anything more from Ms. Lee, her publisher, Harper, announced plans to publish a manuscript—long thought to be lost and now resurfacing in mysterious circumstances—that Ms. Lee had submitted to her editors in 1957 under the title “Go Set a Watchman.” Ms. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, had found it, attached to an original typescript of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” while examining Ms. Lee’s papers, the publishers explained. It told the story of Atticus and his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, 20 years later, when Scout is a young woman living in New York. It included scenes in which Atticus expresses conservative views on race relations seemingly at odds with his liberal stance in the earlier novel.

The book was published in July with an initial printing of 2 million and leapt to the top of the fiction best-seller lists, despite tepid reviews. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was really two books in one: an often humorous portrait of small-town life in the 1930s, and a sobering tale of race relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.

Looking back on her childhood, Scout, the narrator, evokes the simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in Alabama. At the same time, this stark morality tale of a righteous Southern lawyer who stands firm against racism and mob rule struck a chord with Americans. Some reviewers complained that the perceptions attributed to Scout were too complex for a girl starting grade school, and dismissed Atticus as a Southern Judge Hardy, dispensing moral bromides. But by the late 1970s “To Kill a Mockingbird” had sold nearly 10 million copies, and in 1988 the National Council of Teachers of English reported that it was being taught in 74 percent of the nation’s secondary schools. A decade later Library Journal declared it the best novel of the 20th century.

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, in southern Alabama, the youngest of four children. “Nelle” was a backward spelling of her maternal grandmother’s first name.

Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch. Her mother was Frances Finch Lee.

Ms. Lee, like her alter ego Scout, was a tomboy who enjoyed beating up the local boys, climbing trees and rolling in the dirt. One boy on the receiving end of Nelle’s thrashings was Truman Persons (later Capote), who spent summers next door to Nelle with relatives. The two became friends.

Mr. Capote later wrote Nelle into his first book, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” as the tomboy Idabel Tompkins. Ms. Lee in turn cast Mr. Capote as the little blond tale-spinner Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Ms. Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local Methodist school, then transferred to the University of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father, who hoped that she might become a lawyer. Her own interests, however, led her elsewhere.

After college, she decided to go to New York and become a writer. Arriving in Manhattan in 1949, she worked as an airlines reservations agent and at night wrote on a desk made from a door. She developed a portfolio of short stories, which she took to an agent, Maurice Crain, who suggested she try writing a novel. Two months later she returned with 50 pages of a manuscript she called “Go Set a Watchman.”

It told the story of a small-town lawyer who stands guard outside a jail to protect his client against an angry mob, a central incident in the novel-to-be, whose title Mr. Crain changed to “Atticus” and later, as the manuscript evolved, to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The title refers to an incident in which Atticus, on giving air rifles to his children, tells them they can shoot at tin cans but never at a mockingbird. Scout learns from Miss Maudie Atkinson, the widow across the street, that there is a proverb, “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” and the reason for it: the birds harm no one and only make beautiful music.

Editors at Lippincott encouraged Ms. Lee to revise. Eventually they assigned her to work with Tay Hohoff, an editor with whom she developed a close personal and professional relationship.

As the novel moved toward publication, Mr. Capote called with a proposal. He was going to Kansas to research the shocking murder of a farm family. Would Ms. Lee like to come along as his “assistant researchist”?

She jumped at the offer. For months, she accompanied Mr. Capote as he interviewed police investigators and local folk, and each night she wrote for him detailed reports on her impressions.

When the book, “In Cold Blood,” was published in 1966 to much acclaim, Mr. Capote repaid Ms. Lee’s help with a brief thank you on the dedication page and thereafter minimized her role in the book’s creation. By then the friendship had cooled, and it entered a deep freeze after “To Kill a Mockingbird” became a best seller.

Signs of its success were visible almost immediately after its publication in July 1960. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild made the novel one of their selections, and Reader’s Digest condensed it. A week after publication, the novel jumped to the top of the best-seller list, remaining there for 88 weeks.

But a next novel refused to come. “Success has had a very bad effect on me,” Ms. Lee told a reporter. “I’ve gotten fat—but extremely uncomplacent. I’m running just as scared as before.”

Ms. Lee lived a quiet but relatively normal life in Monroeville, where friends and neighbors closed ranks around her to fend off unwelcome attention by tourists and reporters.

News of the rediscovery of “Go Set a Watchman” threw the literary world into turmoil. Many critics found the timing and the rediscovery story suspicious, and questioned whether Ms. Lee was mentally competent to approve its publication.

It remained an open question, for many critics, whether “Go Set a Watchman” was anything more than the initial draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” from which, at the behest of her editors, Ms. Lee had excised the scenes from Scout’s childhood and developed them into a separate book. “I was a first-time writer, and I did what I was told,” Ms. Lee wrote in a statement issued by her publisher in 2015.

Many readers, who had grown up idolizing Atticus, were crushed by his portrayal, 20 years on, as a defender of segregation.

“The depiction of Atticus in ‘Watchman’ makes for disturbing reading, and for ‘Mockingbird’ fans, it’s especially disorienting,” the critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times. “Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integrationist, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion.”