In Memoriam: Writers We'll Miss

It's been a quieter and less interesting world since February 20, when Hunter S. Thompson, who created gonzo journalism out of his manic life and skid-mark prose, put a gun to his head -- and later had his ashes blasted from a cannon.

If few other writers made such a dramatic exit, this has nonetheless been a long, sad year on the literary obituary watch. You could make a sound case that, from last December to this, America has lost, in Saul Bellow, its finest novelist; in Arthur Miller -- or August Wilson, take your pick -- its greatest playwright; and, in Susan Sontag, its most astute critic.

In June, Shelby Foote died at 88. Once known mostly as Walker Percy's best friend, Foote found late fame as the storytelling sage of Ken Burns's 1990 Civil War documentary and lived to see his monumental three-volume history of the war -- with its beautiful expository prose -- discovered once more.

Ed McBain, who perfected the modern police procedural novel (and, as Evan Hunter, wrote the screenplay for "The Birds"), died in July. John Fowles, whose The French Lieutenant's Woman helped define the postmodern novel, died in November.

But what does it mean to sort through the list of last year's dead? In her first novel, To the Precipice , Judith Rossner wrote: "I despised Walter for opening the morning paper to the death notices; he read the obituaries as though they were the closing figures and he were a stockbroker." Rossner, who captured the anxieties of a generation of women with Looking for Mr. Goodbar , died in August.

When a performing artist dies, it's like a spotlight suddenly going dark. But the death of a writer is somehow different. The act of writing, of recording thoughts and words on a page, is in itself an attempt to grasp immortality. The work does not expire with the final curtain. In a strange way, death furnishes a new opportunity for writers. At last, the life and works are complete, and, in Miller's famous words, "attention must be paid."

This year's obituaries gave us occasion to turn back to Mary Lee Settle's Beulah Quintet , to Peter Davison's poetry and to Guy Davenport's stories and essays. You could quickly fill a shelf with other writers who died: Frank Conroy, who practically launched the modern literary memoir with Stop-Time ; Shana Alexander, who wrote about Jean Harris, Patricia Hearst and other women in trouble; Will Eisner, father of the graphic novel; Tristan Egolf, a promising novelist who killed himself at 33; Stanley Burnshaw, a jack-of-all-literary-trades who lived to 99; Ba Jin, a Chinese novelist who initially supported Mao's revolution; Liu Binyan, who challenged Mao's authority in exile; Elizabeth Janeway, who helped give feminism a voice; M. Scott Peck, who had millions of followers on "The Road Less Traveled"; and Michael Kernan, a novelist who was for years a master stylist at The Washington Post.

In 1976, Bellow, who virtually invented a robust, brainy American urban idiom in his novels, won the Nobel Prize for literature. When the considerably more obscure Claude Simon, a founder of the experimental French le nouveau roman , was awarded the Nobel in 1985, Calvin Trillin quipped, "Susan Sontag better have heard of this guy, or there'll be trouble."

Now all are gone -- Bellow, Simon and Sontag herself. Yet their words endure, and that may be the greatest afterlife any writer could aspire to.

Matt Schudel is an obituary writer for The Washington Post.