An obituary is an article about a recently deceased person. Newspapers often publish obituaries as news articles. Although obituaries tend to focus on positive aspects of the subject's life, this is not always the case. According to Nigel Farndale, the Obituaries Editor of The Times: "Obits should be life affirming rather than gloomy, but they should also be opinionated, leaving the reader with a strong sense of whether the subject lived a good life or bad; whether they were right or wrong in the handling of their public affairs."
Aljean Meltsir Harmetz is an American journalist and film historian. She was the Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times from 1978 to 1990.
Norma Fox Mazer was an American author and teacher, best known for her books for children and young adults. Her novels featured credible young characters confronting difficult situations such as family separation and death.
Lori Jakiela is an American author of memoirs and poetry. She won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for non-fiction for her third memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe, in 2016.
Nan C. Robertson was an American journalist, author and instructor in journalism. Her awards included a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
Charles Higham was an English author, editor and poet.
Francine du Plessix Gray was a French-American Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer and literary critic.
Hugh John Massingberd, originally Hugh John Montgomery and known from 1963 to 1992 as Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, was an English journalist and genealogist. He was chief editor of Burke's Peerage/Burke's Landed Gentry from 1971 to 1983.
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
Eden Ross Lipson was an editor at The New York Times, a scholar and children's books writer.
Sarah Elizabeth Wright was an American writer and social activist. Her novel This Child's Gonna Live, published in 1969, was acclaimed by critics and "was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex". The New York Times named it "outstanding book of 1969" and it was called a "small masterpiece".
Oscar Joseph Slater was the victim of a notorious miscarriage of justice in Scotland. Wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, he was freed after almost two decades of hard labour at Scotland’s HM Prison Peterhead through the efforts of multiple journalists, lawyers, and writers, including Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The William Saroyan International Prize for Writing is a biennial literary award for fiction and nonfiction in the spirit of William Saroyan by emerging writers. It was established by Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation to "encourage new or emerging writers rather than recognize established literary figures;" the prize being $12,500.
Madeleine Bettina Stern, born in New York, New York, was an independent scholar and rare book dealer. She graduated from Barnard College in 1932 with a B.A. in English literature. She received her M.A. in English literature from Columbia University in 1934. Stern was particularly known for her work on the writer Louisa May Alcott. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943 to write a biography of Alcott, which was eventually published in 1950. In 1945, she and her friend Leona Rostenberg opened Rostenberg & Stern Books. Rostenberg and Stern were active members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, at a time when few women were members. The pair lived and worked in Rostenberg's house in the Bronx. They were known for creating unique rare book catalogs. In 1960, Stern helped found the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.
Elizabeth Cohen is an American television news journalist for CNN. She is the channel's senior medical correspondent and appears on various programs.
Etheleen Renee Shipp is an American journalist and columnist. As a columnist for the New York Daily News, she was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "her penetrating columns on race, welfare and other social issues."
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code is a 2013 nonfiction book by Margalit Fox, about the process of deciphering the Linear B script, and particularly the contributions of classicist Alice Kober. Fox, who has degrees in linguistics, relied on access to Kober's collected letters and papers.
Obit is a 2016 documentary film about the obituary writers at The New York Times.
Emily Jane Fox is an American reporter for Vanity Fair online magazine The Hive and author of the 2018 book Born Trump: Inside America's First Family.
Nona Balakian was a literary critic and an editor at the New York Times Sunday Book Review. She served on the Pulitzer Prize committee and was a board member of the Authors Guild and the Pen Club as well as a founder of the National Book Critics Circle, whose Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing is named for her.
