Those Who Left Us: Literary Obits of 2021

This highly selective list of literary lights that were extinguished during the past year ranges from brand names to barely-knowns. Feel free to add your own names to the list in the comments section below. Joan Didion, anyone?

Scott Donaldson

While working as a newspaper reporter in Virginia in 1988, I got sent to the College of William & Mary to interview Scott Donaldson, a professor who had just published a biography of John Cheever. Donaldson spent a long afternoon telling me about how his one encounter with Cheever in the summer of 1976 blossomed into a critically acclaimed biography. The conversation wandered to other topics—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drinking, the Cheever family’s protective attitude toward John, the impossibility of ever truly understanding another person’s life. As I wrote of Donaldson in my newspaper article: “It was his turn to do the talking, and he, like Cheever a dozen summers ago on Nantucket, had plenty to say.”

Donaldson, who died on Dec. 1, 2020 at 92 (the announcement came too late for last year’s wrap-up), also produced biographies and critical studies of Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, , and . Donaldson’s book about this last subject, , led me to interview him again in 2012 for . By then, had come out with his own critically acclaimed—and much darker—biography of Cheever, and Donaldson had mellowed after some sharp skirmishing with Bailey and the Cheever family. During our second interview, Donaldson shared a passage from a work in progress that became his final book, , a study of the art of writing literary biography. The passage closed with Donaldson’s clear-eyed, nearly cold-blooded assessment of his Cheever biography: “Perhaps no life ends happily, but I depicted Cheever—as I had Fitzgerald, a man he resembled in many ways—as heroic for overcoming addiction and soldiering on. In doing so, I may well have traveled from unjustified fault-finding to unwarranted praise.”