Dead Celebrity Alert

Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood’s first major black director with “The Learning Tree” and the hit “Shaft,” died Tuesday, a family member said. He was 93.

Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer, died in New York, his nephew, Charles Parks, said in a telephone interview from Lawrence, Kan. …

He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968.

But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil rights movement. … Read full obituary

Peter Benchley, whose novel “Jaws” terrorized millions of swimmers even as the author himself became an advocate for the conservation of sharks, has died at age 65, his widow said Sunday.

Wendy Benchley, married to the author for 41 years, said he died Saturday night at their home in Princeton, N.J. The cause of death, she said, was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and a fatal scarring of the lungs.

Thanks to Benchley’s 1974 novel, and Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie of the same name, the simple act of ocean swimming became synonymous with fatal horror, of still water followed by ominous, pumping music, then teeth and blood and panic. …

Benchley, the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and son of author Nathaniel Benchley, was born in New York City in 1940. … Read full obituary

BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — Alan Shalleck, who collaborated with the co-creator of “Curious George” to bring the mischievous monkey to television and a series of book sequels, was found dead outside his home, and police were treating the death as a possible homicide.

The bloodied body of Shalleck, 76, was found Tuesday covered in garbage bags in the driveway of his mobile home. Police said it was there for at least a day before a maintenance man discovered it. …

Shalleck’s death came just as “Curious George” is debuting as a full-length feature film this Friday, featuring the voices of Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore and Dick Van Dyke, among others.

Shalleck, 76, was the writer and director of more than 100 short episodes of “Curious George,” which were seen on the Disney Channel. …

A Syracuse University drama major, Shalleck got his start in 1950 in the CBS mailroom, working his way up to associate producer for “Winky Dink and You”… Read full obituary

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto “The Feminine Mystique” became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85. …

Friedan’s assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era. …

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women’s movement had to remain in the American mainstream…

To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was “hopelessly bourgeois,” Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.

Friedan, deeply opposed to “equating feminism with lesbianism,” conceded later that she had been “very square” and uncomfortable about homosexuality. … Read full obituary

Pioneering psychotherapist and writer Betty Berzon died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 78 years old.

Berzon had been sick with cancer, but still continued to see patients and write while undergoing chemotherapy.

Her desire to continue work while sick seemed like classic Berzon persistence. She was known for turning one of the lowest points of her life into her life’s direction. During her early adult years, she had been hospitalized after trying to kill herself, in part because she struggled with her sexual orientation. During her recovery, doctors encouraged her to become a psychotherapist. She went on to become one of our community’s best-known, with a gift for helping gay people come to terms with their true selves and with each other. …

She was one of the founding board members for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1971. …

[Terry] DeCrescenzo, the president of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services, and Berzon became a couple in 1973. They married in 1993 during a mass wedding ceremony at the March on Washington. … Read full obituary

CBC News — December 19, 2005 — A Calgary woman who wrote a book about being attacked by a grizzly bear has died in Kelowna, B.C.

Patricia Anne Van Tighem, 47, took her own life. Her family says it was the long lasting effects of the attack 22-years ago that led to her death.

In 1983, she and her husband were hiking in Waterton Lakes National Park when they came upon a female grizzly and her cubs. Both Patricia and her husband were badly mauled.

Patricia’s facial disfigurements and reconstructive surgery were the focus of her best-selling book “In the Bear’s Embrace.” … Read full obituary

Stan Berenstain, who with his wife, Jan, created the classic children’s books about the Berenstain Bears, has died at the age of 82.

Berenstain, who lived with his wife in Bucks County, Pa., died Saturday, according to a spokesperson for HarperCollins Children’s Books.

Born in Philadelphia in 1923, Stanley Berenstain met his wife while they were students at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art.

They began drawing together and, after his stint with the U.S. army during the Second World War, launched a cartooning career that included contributions to publications like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. Together, they created the ongoing illustrated feature It’s All in the Family, which appeared in McCall’s and, later, Good Housekeeping magazine.

The couple eventually moved into book illustration and, in the early 1960s, began to develop their Berenstain Bears series under editor Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, who was head of children’s publishing at Random House at the time. … Read full obituary

Shelby Foote, the author who died in Memphis June 27 at the age of 88, never imagined fame would come the way it did. As a youth in Mississippi, he dreamed of being a great novelist, like William Faulkner, whom he and his boyhood pal Walker Percy once visited. Foote wrote novels but none as acclaimed as those of either Faulkner or Percy. It was his gigantic piece of nonfiction — a three-volume, 2,934-page, 1.5 million-word history, The Civil War: A Narrative — that convinced critics of Foote’s remarkable skills. But despite the 20 years of research and writing he put into his monumental work, most Americans would never have heard of Shelby Foote. That changed over the course of one week in 1990 — the week the writer became a talker.

In five consecutive nights in the autumn of that year, Foote made 89 appearances on Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War. Fourteen million viewers saw him in his Memphis study talking about the war as if it had happened the day before. His detailed knowledge, Delta drawl, and courtly manner helped make the series a smash hit and turned him into a prime-time star, a status ironically that he did not totally enjoy. He lamented “this hoorah” and “this ruckjack,” the commotion that brought forth a “horrendous” flow of letters and phone calls, not to mention nosy questions from journalists. When one reporter asked if he had any hobbies, he replied: “Absolutely not.” Then he added, “I drink from time to time.” … Read full obituary

Richard Eberhart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet considered one of the foremost writers of lyric verse in the 20th century, died on Thursday at his home in Hanover, N.H. He was 101. …

The author of several dozen volumes of poetry, Mr. Eberhart won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for “Selected Poems, 1930-1965″ (New Directions, 1965) and a National Book Award in 1977 for “Collected Poems, 1930-1976″ (Oxford University, 1976).

At his death, Mr. Eberhart was emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College, where he had taught since 1956. He was also, variously, a crewman on a tramp steamer, a maker of furniture polish and a tutor to the crown prince of Siam.

With their concern for the natural world, and their persistent exploration of the tension between spirit and matter, Mr. Eberhart’s poems hark back to the Romantic tradition of Blake and Wordsworth. (He parted company with full-blown Romanticism through his use of short lines and irregular rhythms.) … Read full obituary

The American feminist icon, writer and campaigner Andrea Dworkin, who linked pornography to rape and violence, died at the weekend, her agent said today. She was 59 years old.

Her radical-feminist critique of pornography began with her first book, Woman Hating, published when she was 27. She campaigned frequently on the subject, helping to draft a law in 1983 that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women.

The law, later overturned by an appeal court as unconstitutional, was inspired by the case of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace said she had had been violently coerced into pornography, including the film Deep Throat, but had no recourse to the courts.

The drive of Ms Dworkin’s writing and activism was to break the silence around violence against women, but her wider career saw her become a figure of adulation and loathing in equal measure. To opponents she was an archetypal man-hater, killjoy and proponent of censorship, but supporters rallied to her impassioned lectures and books. … Read full obituary

Related:
“Deep Throat” star Linda Lovelace

NEW YORK — Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and other novels both championed and mourned the soul’s fate in the modern world, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Bellow’s close friend and attorney, Walter Pozen, said the writer had been in declining health, but was “wonderfully sharp to the end.” Pozen said that Bellow’s wife and daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass. … Read full obituary

DENVER Feb 21, 2005 — Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67. …

Juan Thompson found his father’s body. Thompson’s wife, Anita, was not home at the time.

Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson’s visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72.” The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was “Dr. Thompson,” a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.

Thompson is credited with pioneering New Journalism or, as he dubbed it, “gonzo journalism” in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story. Much of his earliest work appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. … Read full obituary

Author Susan Sontag, widely regarded as one of America’s leading intellectuals, has died aged 71.

The writer, who had suffered from leukaemia, died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Calling herself an “obsessed moralist”, Sontag was the author of 17 books and a lifelong human rights activist.

She wrote best-selling historical novel The Volcano Lover and in 2000 won the National Book Award for another historical novel, In America.

Her greatest literary impact was as an essayist, however, with her 1964 study of homosexual aesthetics Notes on Camp establishing her as a major new writer. …

Sontag, who described herself as a “zealot of seriousness”, was also a human rights activist and an outspoken opponent of US foreign policy. … Read full obituary

John H. Waller, a former high-ranking official in the CIA who also wrote a half-dozen books on espionage and other topics, died of complications from pneumonia Nov. 4. He was 81.

Waller was a historian who wrote full time after retiring from the CIA as its inspector general in 1980.

Perhaps best known among his writings was “Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to British Disaster in the First Afghan War,” published by Random House in 1990. … Read full obituary

NEW YORK — The body of actor-writer Spalding Gray was pulled from the East River over the weekend, two months after he walked out of his Manhattan apartment and disappeared. He was 62.

Gray, who laid bare his life and mingled performance art with comedy in acclaimed monologues like “Swimming to Cambodia” and “It’s a Slippery Slope,” was identified Monday through dental records and X-rays.

The cause of his death was still under investigation, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner. But Gray was known to have been deeply troubled and had attempted suicide before. … Read full obituary