Last Tuesday (12/27/2016), the day Carrie Fisher died, my Facebook feed was filled with lamentations about all the well-known people who had died in 2016. Later that day came the report of the death of Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, on Christmas Eve. And then the following day Carrie’s mother, Debbie Reynolds, died.
Have we really lost more shining stars than usual in 2016, or does it just seem that way because quite a few deaths clustered around the year’s final few days? For the last several years I’ve posted a list similar to this one, and it always seems that the list is longer than we’d like.
Here, with a link to an obituary (if available), are the lights we lost from the literary world in 2016.
Florence King, 1/6
Sylvan Barnet, 1/11
Brian Bedford, 1/13
Skip Skwarek, 1/15
Michel Tournier, 1/18
Forrest McDonald, 1/19
George Weidenfeld, 1/20
David G. Hartwell, 1/20
Edmonde Charles-Roux, 1/20
David G. Hartwell, 1/20
Paul Aiken, 1/29
Margaret Forster, 2/8
Jake Page, 2/10
Harper Lee, 2/19
Umberto Eco, 2/19
Louise Rennison, 2/29
Pat Conroy, 3/4
Anita Brookner, 3/10
Geoffrey H. Hartman, 3/14
Jim Harrison, 3/26
Adrienne Rich, 3/27
Frank De Felitta, 3/29
E.M. Nathanson, 4/5
James Cross Giblin, 4/10
Glenn Ellis, 4/11
Arnold Wesker, 4/12
Jackie Carter, 4/13
Jenny Diski, 4/28
Katherine Dunn, 5/12
Yang Jiang, 5/25
David Lamb, 6/5
Peter Shaffer, 6/6
Rhoda Blumberg, 6/6
William Wright, 6/11
Lois Duncan, 6/15
Michael Herr, 6/23
Austin Clarke, 6/26
Alvin Toffler, 6/27
Judy Feiffer, 6/27
Geoffrey Hill, 6/30
Yves Bonnefoy, 7/1
Elie Wiesel, 7/2
Robert Nye, 7/2
William Gaines, 7/20
Tim LaHaye, 7/25
James Alan McPherson, 7/27
Mahasweta Devi, 7/28
Jim Northrup, 8/1
Joyce Carol Thomas, 8/13
Max Ritvo, 8/23
Michel Butor, 8/24
Warren Hinckle, 8/25
Anna Dewdney, 9/3
Robert Timberg, 9/6
Barbara Seuling, 9/12
D. Keith Mano, 9/14
Edward Albee, 9/16
William P. Kinsella, 9/16
Gloria Naylor, 9/28
Dario Fo, 10/13
Lucia Perillo, 10/16
Natalie Babbitt, 10/31
E. R. Braithwaite, 12/12
Shirley Hazzard, 12/12
David Berry, 12/16
Richard Adams, 12/24
Carrie Fisher, 12/27
