The Book Depository blog

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Sad news: Howard Zinn, the great American historian, playwright and author of many books including the bestselling A People's History of the United States has died aged 87.

The Boston Globe quote Noam Chomsky in saying: "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture... He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect."

There is lots more information over at via howardzinn.org.

J.D. Salinger, who shocked one generation and inspired another with a classic novel of teenage rebellion, died yesterday at home in New Hampshire, aged 91.

This from the New York Times:

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, saying it was of natural causes. "Despite having broken his hip in May," the agency said, "his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his 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 (more...)

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The 1974 Booker prize-winning author of Holiday, Stanley Middleton, has died aged 89. Middleton was critically vaunted, but is something of a forgotten writer even in the UK.

This from the Guardian newspaper:

Middleton, who lived in Nottingham [in the British Midlands] jointly won the Booker in 1974 for his quietly skilful novel in which a lecturer retreats to a seaside resort to escape the death of his son and the failure of his marriage. Ronald Blythe, reviewing the book at the time, said that "we need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is about. Holiday is vintage Middleton. The result of Mr Middleton's analysis is so satisfying that one has to look at 19th-century writing for comparable storytelling." He shared the prize with Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist.

Middleton was remarkably prolific: his writing career spanned six decades and 44 novels, most of which were set in his home town of Nottingham, tackling the domestic lives of ordinary people. His most recent, Her Three Wise Men, was published in 2008.

Tony Whittome, Middleton's editor for more than a quarter of a century, said he had been working on a new novel when he died after a long struggle with cancer.

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Frank McCourt, the best-selling author of Angela's Ashes, has died aged 78. This via the Daily Mail:

He had contracted meningitis after battling skin cancer, and his condition had progressively worsened over the last two days.

Initially he responded well to treatment he was receiving at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and last month was allowed to return home to Connecticut.

But two weeks ago he was diagnosed with meningitis, a complication that affects one in 25 melanoma patients, and was transferred to a hospice in Manhattan.

Sad news from Dan Green:

Some of you may heard that James Purdy, in my opinion one of the great American writers of the post-World War II era, has died at the age of 94.

That the news hasn't circulated much around the literary blogosphere doesn't surprise me, as most of the books that brought him whatever modicum of fame he enjoyed during his career were published in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the years since his name recognition has faded and many of his books have fallen out of print. In the 60s he was frequently identified as a writer of "black humor fiction" (along with writers such as Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman) and after that label itself faded into the literary past he became increasingly considered as a gay writer, but neither of these designations really capture either his scorching humor or his wide-ranging thematic concerns...

In the meantime, anyone who would like to learn more about Purdy would be well-served by consulting this website sponsored by the James Purdy Society. The linked-to interview with Purdy is especially worthwhile.