January 21, 2010

Much of John Updike’s work proves the adage that writers write best about that of which they know. This two-time Pulitzer Prize winner had inauspicious beginnings, growing up in small-town Pennsylvania in a stone farmhouse on 80 acres of land. The area became the setting for many of his novels about middle-class life. Most popular was the “Rabbit” series, including Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, based on the character of the small-town athlete Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.Updike wrote from an early age, working for the high school newspaper and excelling in school; he earned a scholarship to Harvard University. There he wrote and drew satirical cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon. The year he graduated, summa cum laude, he wrote and sold a poem to The New Yorker. While studying for a year at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, in London, Updike met E.B. and Katharine White, The New Yorker‘s editors, who encouraged him to apply for a job at the magazine. Updike moved to Manhattan and became a staff writer, a position he maintained for only two years (though he contributed to the magazine throughout his life). Moving his family to Massachusetts, Updike adhered to a strict six-days-a-week writing schedule from his home. Rabbit, Run was Updike’s second novel. His publisher, Knopf, feared that the frank description of Rabbit’s sexual adventures could lead to prosecution for obscenity, but the book was published to widespread acclaim without legal repercussions.

In 1963, Updike received the National Book Award for his novel The Centaur, a modern myth inspired by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following year, at age 32, he became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was invited by the State Department to tour Eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. Updike’s novel Couples created a national sensation with its portrayal of the relationships among a set of young married couples in the suburbs. During the 1970s, Updike continued to travel as a cultural ambassador. Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest were published in 1981 and 1991, respectively. He published 60 books in his lifetime, working in a wide range of genres from essays to criticisms to poetry. (76, lung cancer) —C.C.

Paul Hemphill
Birmingham native Paul Hemphill wrote of a world filled with stock cars, college football, preachers, whiskey, and all-around hell-raisers that defined Southern culture. Hemphill’s newspaper columns were among his most controversial, condemning racism at a time when the subject was frequently overlooked in the Deep South. He had a knack for capturing the essence of the underbelly of Dixieland, where he admittedly consorted with prostitutes and moonshine swillers.

A former intern at the Birmingham News, Hemphill found work as a sportswriter after his semi-pro baseball career fizzled out. Eventually, he became a daily columnist for the Atlanta Journal, where his columns about the common man became a hit with readers. He authored The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, which is viewed as one of the best accounts of the country music world. Hemphill wrote with simple, blunt honesty as he described the sins of his native region, including a memoir of the strained relationship with his racist, truck-driving father called Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son. (73, throat cancer) —Ed Reynolds

William Safire
William Safire, presidential speechwriter, political columnist, and author, had the unique misfortune of being both a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and a target of national security wiretaps authorized by the former president. Safire was best known for his syndicated column in the New York Times, his regular appearances on TV’s “Meet the Press,” and his writing on language and etymology. A college dropout, he entered politics by way of public relations; while exhibiting a model home at an American trade fair in Moscow in 1959, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev debated there (in what later become known as the “kitchen debate”) over the merits of capitalism versus communism. Safire photographed the event and later joined Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns. In 1973, he became a political columnist for the New York Times. In addition to writing several books and novels, from 1979 through the month of his death, Safire wrote the “On Language” column for the New York Times Magazine. (79, pancreatic cancer) —C.C.

	Frank McCourt (click for larger version)

Frank McCourt
Although he spent most of his life as a teacher, it is for his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, that author Frank McCourt will be remembered. McCourt was born in Brooklyn, but his family returned to Ireland soon after his birth, where they fell into even deeper poverty. Angela’s Ashes recounts those years spent in the shadow of his father, an unemployed alcoholic whose habits kept the family broke. Three of McCourt’s six siblings died of diseases brought on in part by squalor and malnutrition; McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever at age 10. His book describes the awful circumstances of his daily life in Ireland, yet manages to inject humor and lightness throughout the tale. At 19, McCourt returned to the United States only to be drafted into the Korean War; on his return he talked his way into New York University (despite having never graduated high school). He graduated and got a job teaching creative writing in the New York City Public School system, which he did for 27 years. It was at his students’ urging over the years that he began writing and sharing his work with his classes. He finally wrote his memoir, which was published in 1996. It has sold more than 4 million copies, been translated into dozens of languages, and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. (78, meningitis) —Christina Crowe

Dominick Dunne
Crime writer Dominick Dunne could be considered the forefather to such celebrity “news” outlets as TV’s E! network or TMZ.com. His life took him from wealth to the throes of addiction, from fatherhood to the grief of outliving his own daughters (two of whom died in infancy), from New York to Hollywood, all the while developing a career in investigative journalism. This born-rich Irish Catholic boy grew to become a TV executive and film producer in mid-1970s Hollywood, where he nearly crashed from alcohol and drug addiction. A period of self-exile from society resulted in his first book, The Winners. The murder of his daughter, TV actress Dominique Dunne, and the subsequent trial of her killer resulted in the legal journalism for which Dunne would come to be known.

He wrote an article titled, “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer” for Vanity Fair, after which he became a contributing writer for the magazine. In the same genre, Dunne took several real-life murders, such as that of department store magnate Alfred Bloomingdale’s mistress, and fictionalized them in what became best-selling books. On the now-defunct CourtTV cable network, Dunne hosted a series called “Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice,” in which he covered celebrity trials including those of Phil Spector, the Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Skakel, among others. In 2008, at age 82, Dunne traveled to Las Vegas to cover O.J. Simpson’s kidnapping trial for Vanity Fair. Clearly not wishing to be forgotten in death, Dunne wrote several memoirs and autobiographies and produced a film about his own life. (83, bladder cancer) —Christina Crowe

Donald Westlake
“Whatever Stark writes, I read. He’s a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.” —Elmore Leonard.

There’s an endorsement that makes sense. Most of Donald Westlake’s gritty crime thrillers conjure the same grim world one encounters in Elmore Leonard’s dark yarns. The three-time Edgar Award-winning mystery writer used more than a dozen pen names, Richard Stark being the most prolific. His were stories of heists gone wrong, betrayals, and curious coincidences that set bad men on bad paths to destruction. When adapted to the screen—and several were—Westlake’s tales called for genuine troublemakers and two-fisted anti-heroes such as Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and certainly Lee Marvin, who starred in the especially brutal Point Blank. For undistilled ugliness, however, Westlake’s screen adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters remains untouched. (75, heart attack) —David Pelfrey