SFWA Grand Master Anne McCaffrey, 85, died November 21, 2011 of a massive stroke at home in Ireland.

via Locus Online News » Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011).

Belva Plain, who became a best-selling author at age 59 and whose multigenerational family sagas of Jewish-American life won a loyal readership in the millions, died on Tuesday at her home in Short Hills, N.J. She was 95.

OK, so her fiction wasn’t the most high-brow stuff. But reading Belva Plain’s novels was always near the top of my “guilty pleasures” list.

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.

Barry Hannah, a writer who found wide acclaim with wild, darkly comic short stories and novels set in a phantasmagoric South moving at warp speed, died on Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67.

Best-selling crime writer Dick Francis, who drew on his experience as a successful steeplechase jockey for his racing thrillers, has died aged 89, the BBC said on Sunday.

Francis rode more than 350 winners, and was champion jockey before injury forced him to take up the pen, first writing for a national newspaper as a racing correspondent and then producing more than 40 novels, many of them international bestsellers.

We’ve had too many of these obituaries recently.

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 Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Dominick Dunne, who gave up producing movies in midlife and reinvented himself as a best-selling author, magazine writer, television personality and reporter whose celebrity often outshone that of his subjects, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist activist whose debut novel, ‘The Women’s Room,’ propelled her into a leading role in the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan.
. . .
With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. ‘My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,’ she once declared.

John Updike, Critic and Author, Dies At Age 76

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author John Updike Dies at Age 76 [Real Player]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99942825

Remembering Updike

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/remembering-upd/

For better or worse, John Updike produced a nearly endless stream of work

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-mew-updike-appreciate28-2009jan28,0,6965396.story

John Updike: This I Believe [Real Player]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99919409

Invisible Cathedral: A Walk Through the New Modern

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/15/041115crat_atlarge

Updike Desert Comix

http://harvardlampoon.com/?q=node/266

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml

This Tuesday, John Updike, chronicler of the American condition in the mid and late twentieth century passed away in Danvers, Massachusetts. Throughout his six decades of writing, Updike found time to write about the world of suburban existence (and ennui), colonial Africa, a Jewish writer in Eastern Europe, and a group of women living in a small New England Town in The Witches of Eastwick, and its 2008 follow-up volume, The Widows of Eastwick. Updike was always the polymath, and during his student days at Harvard University, he found time to write and draw cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon. He continued his diverse pursuits throughout his life, as he wrote a great deal of literary criticism for publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times. In an interview, Updike remarked that his primary subject was “Protestant, small-town middle class.” Literary organizations and institutions responded positively to his various narratives, as he was the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and three National Book Critics’ Circle awards during his lifetime. [KMG]

The first link will take users to a news story from National Public Radio this Wednesday, which reports on Updike’s passing. The second link leads to a lovely selection of Updike remembrances offered by fellow literary travelers Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Theroux, Richard Ford, and others. Moving on, the third link leads to a reflection on Updike’s work and legacy by David L. Ulin, which appeared in this Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times. The fourth link will whisk users away Updike’s personal essay from 2005 offered as part of the “This I Believe” series. The fifth link leads to Updike’s assessment of the new Museum of Modern Art, which appeared in the November 15, 2004 edition of The New Yorker. The sixth link will take interested parties to one of the “comix” he created for the Harvard Lampoon during his stay in Cambridge. Finally, the last link leads to one of Updike’s most beloved pieces of writing (particularly for baseball fans), “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”. It’s a piece that describes the world of Ted Williams as he prepares for his last game with the Boston Red Sox, and it’s one that’s worth rereading, even if it might be the twentieth time. [KMG]

>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2009. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters, moving fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

More on this American author, who died earlier today.