Martin Gardner, 95, revered author and 'Alice' expert, dies

The book "memorializes the meeting of two remarkable eccentric minds in a particular moment in intellectual history," wrote critic Adam Gopnik in the New York Times in 1999, upon the release of a new edition of "The Annotated Alice."

"Gardner has an old-fashioned, almost 19th-century, Oliver Wendell Holmes kind of American mind -- self-educated, opinionated, cranky and utterly unafraid of embarrassment."

Mr. Gardner used a similar technique to annotate other classics, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge's long poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Ernest L. Thayer's baseball poem "Casey at the Bat."

In interviews, Mr. Gardner said that among his favorite works was "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener" (1983), a collection of essays about issues including faith, prayer, evil and immortality. Faith was also the subject of his 1973 semi-autobiographical novel, "The Flight of Peter Fromm," in which the title character and his atheist professor of divinity grapple for decades with questions about God.

"This is a brilliantly illuminating metaphysical novel that employs ideas as adversaries and translates them into human dilemmas," wrote Martin Levin in a New York Times review. "Can a novel whose action is essentially cerebral be exciting? Yes indeed -- if the novelist is as engaged by the history of ideas as is Gardner."

Writing at Humpty Dumpty

Martin Gardner was born Oct. 21, 1914, in Tulsa, where his father owned a small oil business. The younger Gardner grew up playing chess, practicing magic tricks and reading the "Wizard of Oz" series, which he later satirized in the 1998 novel "Visitors From Oz: The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman."

He graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in philosophy in 1936, then worked as a journalist and in public relations before serving during World War II as a Navy yeoman aboard a destroyer escort.

He launched a postwar freelance writing career with the publication in Esquire magazine of a story called "The Horse on the Escalator," a tragically comic tale about a man who collected jokes about horses. Several years later, he found steady work in New York at Humpty Dumpty Magazine, a children's publication. Each month for eight years, he wrote a short story and a poem offering moral advice, some of which were later collected in "Never Make Fun of a Turtle, My Son" (1969).

His wife of 48 years, the former Charlotte Greenwald, died in 2000. In addition to his son James, of Norman, survivors include another son, Tom Gardner of Asheville, N.C.; and three grandchildren.

Over the years, Mr. Gardner earned a devoted following and respect from such diverse thinkers as the poet W.H. Auden, science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky, who once wrote, "Martin Gardner's contribution to contemporary intellectual culture is unique -- in its range, its insight, and understanding of hard questions that matter."

The writer's admirers have gathered every two years since 1993 for a conference called "Gathering for Gardner." Begun as a tribute, the event features presentations by magicians, mathematicians and puzzlelovers of every stripe.

"Many have tried to emulate him," mathematician Ronald Graham said of Mr. Gardner in 2009. "No one has succeeded."