Notes in the Margin Weblog

Prolific American author Phyllis A. Whitney has died in Virginia at the age of 104. Although she did not write her first book until she was nearly 40, she published more than 100 short stories, 73 works of fiction, many magazine articles, and three books about how to write fiction (including Writing Juvenile Stories and Novels, 1976, and Guide to Fiction Writing, 1982).

Whitney was born in Japan and spent much of her early life in China, where her father worked. After his death when she was 15, she and her mother lived in Berkeley, California, and then in San Antonio, Texas. She got married in 1925 and gave birth to her only child, a daughter, in 1934.

Whitney began her career as an author with short stories. She supplemented her income from her stories by working in the Chicago Public Library’s children’s room, where she learned about children’s reading preferences. Her first books were A Star for Ann, 1941, and A Window for Julie, 1943, both of which were novels aimed at career information for girls. She also worked as children’s book editor for the Chicago Sun and, later, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and taught a juvenile fiction writing course at New York University between 1947 and 1958.

Her third novel, Red Is for Murder, 1943, was a mystery. She continued to write mystery novels for both children and adults. She twice won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for the best children’s mystery story of the year.

In addition to her early life in Japan and China, Whitney traveled extensively. Locales such as the Philippines and Hawaii provided the setting for many of her novels.

Her last novel, Amethyst Dreams, was published in 1997. She was working on her autobiography at the time of her death.

Deaths of Mailer, Vonnegut close book on influential Vietnam era :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Books
“Here, a roll call of some of the notables in the arts and popular culture who died in 2007.”

Sadly, it’s quite a long list.

Mailer, Paley, Vonnegut: same era, different voices - Los Angeles Times

In a piece in the Los Angeles Times Morris Dickstein discusses three literary icons who died in 2007:

American fiction lost three of its most warmly admired figures this year, all dead at the age of 84 after long careers. Critics love the idea of literary generations, but it would be a challenge to find themes or ideas to link the disparate work of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut. At a Paris Review gala last spring, Mailer spoke about Hemingway’s enormous influence despite his inability to portray a convincing woman character (a charge sometimes leveled at Mailer himself). Hemingway made up for it, he said, by creating a style. In more modest ways, this could be said about Mailer, Paley and Vonnegut as well. No one would mistake a paragraph of theirs for the prose of another writer.

Dickstein focus on “something these contemporaries . . . had in common: a sense of the breakdown of the novel, blurring the lines between literary fiction and autobiography, but also poetry in Paley’s case, science fiction for Vonnegut, journalism and social criticism for Mailer.”

Of Mailer, Dickstein says, “For all his public antics, Mailer’s most memorable exploits took place in the arena of the sentence: arresting metaphors, paradoxical speculations, physical details that made a personality tangible.”

He says “Paley created a distinctive female voice” and also “was dead serious about leftist politics, to which she devoted as much energy as to writing and teaching.”

And Vonnegut “saw himself as an ordinary Joe with a small, peculiar gift.”

“With their accumulated wisdom, these three writers’ living presence mattered, but we might miss them more if they had not left so much behind.”