David Broder, Pulitzer Prize-winning political writer for the Washington Post, dies at 81 [updated]

David Broder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post political columnist whose evenhanded treatment of Democrats and Republicans set him apart from the ideological warriors on the nation's op-ed pages, died Wednesday. He was 81.

Post officials said Broder died of complications from diabetes.

Broder, an Illinois native, was familiar to television viewers as a frequent panelist on NBC's "Meet the Press" program. He appeared on the program more than 400 times, far more than any other journalist in the show's history.

To newspaper readers, he was one of the nation's most prominent syndicated columnists. A September 2007 study by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters found that Broder was second among columnists only to George Will in the combined circulation of newspapers in which his column appeared.

He was the only one of the top five that the group did not label as either conservative or liberal.

"His evenhanded approach has never wavered. He'd make a good umpire," wrote Alan Shear, editorial director of the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicated Broder's column. "Dave is neither left nor right, and can't even be called reliably centrist. He reports exhaustively and his conclusions are grounded in hard facts."

One of his hallmarks was a special effort to meet lots of average citizens who, in the end, really decide elections. In a 1991 lecture, Broder said reporters should spend "a lot of time with voters ... walking precincts, knocking on doors, talking to people in their living rooms. If we really got clearly in our heads what it is voters are concerned about, it might be possible to let their agenda drive our agenda."

The full Times obituary is here.

-- Associated Press

Photo: David Broder on "Meet the Press" in 2008. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images for "Meet the Press"

Arnost Lustig, Holocaust survivor and novelist, dies at 84

Arnost Lustig, who escaped from a Nazi death transport and made the Holocaust the main theme of his novels, died Saturday. He was 84.

Lustig's death was confirmed by Jana Jelinkova, a spokeswoman for Prague's Kralovske Vinohrady university clinic. He had been battling cancer for five years.

His novels included "A Prayer for Katerina Horowitzova," ''Darkness Cast No Shadow" and ''Lovely Green Eyes."

Lustig was twice awarded the National Jewish Book Award and in 1994, he received a literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for exceptional accomplishment. In 2009, he was among the finalists for the Man Booker International Prize.

Born in Prague on Dec. 21, 1926, Lustig survived the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Buchenwald Nazi concentration camps before he escaped from a train that was transporting him to Dachau in 1945. The train's engine was destroyed by an American bomber.

When the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the liberal reforms of Alexander Dubcek and ended an era known as the Prague Spring in 1968, Lustig fled his homeland and, after a stay in Israel, became a professor at American University in Washington.

After the collapse of Communist rule, Lustig visited Prague on a regular basis and later returned to live there.

-- Associated Press

Photo: Arnost Lustig in 2008. Credit: Associated Press

Dwayne McDuffie, comic book writer and 'Static Shock' creator, dies at 49 [updated]

Dwayne McDuffie, who wrote scores of comic books for Marvel and DC and founded his own publishing company before crossing over to television and animation, died Monday, DC Comics said. He was 49.

[Corrected 3:20 p.m.] An earlier post said he died Tuesday. 

The cause and place of death were not immediately known.

McDuffie, a Detroit native, wrote comics for the New York-based DC and Marvel, including runs on "Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight," the Fantastic Four and the Justice League of America. He also penned several animated features, including the just-released "All-Star Superman," ''Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths" and the animated TV series "Static Shock" and "Ben 10: Alien Force."

He founded publishing company Milestone Media in 1992.

[updated 5:55 p.m.] More from the Associated Press:

News of McDuffie's death was first reported Tuesday by the website Comic Book Resources. As recently as last week, McDuffie attended the premieres of the new "All Star Superman" film in Los Angeles and New York, and was scheduled to appear at an event this week at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles.

McDuffie tweeted last week that he was "Taking a break from a script I owe to attend the LA premiere of ‘All Star Superman.’"

McDuffie's work for Marvel included "Damage Control," which took a serious but fictional look at a company whose job it was to clean up the damage — both physical and legal — resulting from battles between superheroes and supervillains. In 1992, however, he formed the comic book company Milestone Media, which gave him the freedom and leeway to create his own characters, many of whom were of differing ethnic backgrounds.

Milestone Media focused on multicultural superheroes including "Hardware," "Icon," "Blood Syndicate," "Xombi" and "Static," which was turned into the popular children's cartoon "Static Shock," on which he served as a story editor.

McDuffie also wrote for other titles and characters, too, including Black Panther and Deathlok.

Besides comics, McDuffie was a producer and story editor on Cartoon Network's "Justice League Unlimited," and wrote and produced episodes of other cartoons, including "What's New, Scooby Doo?," "Ben 10: Ultimate Alien" and "Teen Titans."

McDuffie was nominated for two Emmy Awards for "Static Shock," a Writers Guild award for "Justice League" and three Eisner awards for his work in comic books, his website said.

McDuffie's death took his colleagues and friends by surprise.

Dan DiDio, co-publisher of DC Entertainment, said the writer "left a lasting legacy on the world of comics that many writers can only aspire to. He will not only be remembered as an extremely gifted writer whose scripts have been realized as comics books, in television shows and on the silver screen, but as the creator or co-create of so many of the much-loved Milestone characters, including Static Shock."

Added DiDio: "The industry has lost a true talent."

Tom Brevoort, Marvel's senior vice president for publishing, said McDuffie was a force behind bringing more diversity into comics.

"He was very interested in creating a wider range of multiculturalism in comics, having been profoundly affected by the example of the Black Panther when he was growing up, and wanting to give that same opportunity to others of all races, creeds and religions, which is one of the reasons he left Marvel and co-founded Milestone," Brevoort told the Associated Press. "And he eventually came back to write both 'Beyond!' and 'Fantastic Four' for me."

— Associated Press

James McLure, playwright and actor, dies at 59

James McLure, a playwright and actor best known for his two one-act plays that reached Broadway, died Thursday from cancer at his home in Marina del Rey, said his sister, Jenny Schroeder. He was 59.

McLure's plays "Lone Star," set behind a small-town Texas bar, and "Pvt. Wars," the story of three young Vietnam veterans in a hospital, were produced on Broadway in 1979.

"I'm part of the Vietnam generation," McLure told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch in 1994. "My plays are a combination of autobiography and people I've known."

In a 1984 Times review of an expanded version of "Pvt. Wars" at the Zephyr Theatre in West Hollywood, critic Lawrence Christon noted McLure's "extraordinary delicacy … to suggest how irreparably these men have been wounded, and not altogether physically."

James Miller McLure Jr. was born Aug. 5, 1951, in Alexandria, La., the second of three children of Mary and James McLure. He grew up in Shreveport, La., and graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he started writing "Lone Star" for use in an acting class.

McLure's other plays included "Laundry and Bourbon" and "The Day They Shot John Lennon." His "Wild Oats," a Wild West adaptation of an 18th-century farce by John O'Keefe, was performed at the Mark Taper Forum in 1984.

--Keith Thursby

Photo: James McLure

 

 

Perry Moore, 'Narnia' co-producer and author of novel about gay teen with super powers, dies at 39

Perry Moore, a co-producer of “The Chronicles of Narnia” film series and the author of an award-winning novel about a gay teenager with super powers, has died. He was 39.

Moore was found unconscious in the bathroom of his Manhattan home Thursday. He died later at a hospital, police said. The cause of death will be determined by the city's medical examiner, but no foul play was suspected.

His father, Bill Moore, told the New York Daily News  that an initial autopsy was inconclusive.

Moore had a varied career in television and in film, as producer, screenwriter and director. His 2007 novel, “Hero,” won the Lambda Literary Award for best novel for young gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children or adults.

Moore, who was gay, said in an interview on his website that in writing the novel, he had wanted to tell the story of his father, a Vietnam veteran, and his son.

“Like most young people, I grew up feeling alienated and different -- for very specific reasons in my case -- in a place that didn't value differences,” he said. “I also have this borderline-crazy belief in the power of literature to change the universe. So I'd always wanted to tell this story.”

Moore was an executive producer on all three hugely successful “Narnia” films, and authored a bestselling illustrated book for the first film, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” He directed a 2008 drama with Sissy Spacek called “Lake City” and co-directed a documentary about children's book author Maurice Sendak with Hunter Hill and Spike Jonze.

But it was his novel about a super-powered teenager that seemed to focus his passions. With “Hero,” he said he hoped to create a gay superhero who was not, he said, a supporting character, victim or token. “I decided I would write the definitive coming-of-age story of the world's first gay teen superhero,” he said.

It was the death of one of the first prominent gay heroes in the Marvel Comics universe, Northstar, at the hands of X-Men's Wolverine, that spurred him to finish the book. “He slaughtered the X-Men's token gay hero,” Moore said. “I found this story to be disturbing, to say the least.”

He compiled a list of gay characters in comics to show how most were “minor characters, and victims who are tortured, maimed and killed.”

Moore was born in Virginia and majored in English at the University of Virginia, according to his website. He started his career in television at MTV and VH1, then worked for “The Rosie O'Donnell Show.” He later joined Walden Media, the company that produced the films based on C.S. Lewis' “Narnia” books.

-- Associated Press

Hisaye Yamamoto, pioneering Japanese American writer, dead at 89

Hisaye Yamamoto, a master of the short story whose most moving work delves into the psyches of Japanese Americans who lived through the World War II years, died in Los Angeles on Jan. 30 at age 89.  

In this excerpt from one of her most admired stories, "Seventeen Syllables," Rosie, the teenage daughter of a Japanese immigrant farmer and his poetry-writing wife, has just witnessed her father's violent reaction to her mother's first-place prize in a haiku contest -- he smashes the prize with an ax, douses it with kerosene and burns it:

 Rosie ran past him and toward the house. What had become of her mother? She burst into the parlor and found her mother at the back window watching the dying fire. They watched together until there remained only a feeble smoke under the blazing sun. Her mother was very calm.

"Do you know why I married your father?" she said without turning.

"No," said Rosie. It was the most frightening question she had ever been called upon to answer. Don't tell me now, she wanted to say, tell me tomorrow, tell me next week, don't tell me today. But she knew she would be told now, that the telling would combine with the other violence of the hot afternoon to level her life, her world to the very ground.

It was like a story out of the magazines illustrated in sepia, which she had consumed so greedily for a period until the information had somehow reached her that those wretchedly unhappy autobiographies, offered to her as the testimonials of living men and women, were largely inventions: Her mother, at nineteen, had come to America and married her father as an alternative to suicide.

Read more about Yamamoto's life: "Hisaye Yamamoto dies at 89; writer of Japanese American stories."

-- Elaine Woo 

Photo: Hisaye Yamamoto in 2007. Credit: Mario G. Reyes / Rafu Shimpo

'Redwall' author Brian Jacques dies at 71

Brian Jacques, author of the bestselling "Redwall" adventure books for children, has died in England. He was 71.

Jacques died Saturday in a hospital where he was being treated for an aneurism on his aorta, the Liverpool Echo newspaper reported.

Jacques (pronounced Jakes) was a milk delivery man when he wrote the first Redwall story for children at the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind in Liverpool, one of the stops on his route. The book's hero was a timid mouse named Matthias who found the courage to protect his home, Redwall Abbey.

"I wanted to write something visual that I could read to the children," Jacques said in an interview published on the website of publisher Random House.

"This was when I created the idea of Redwall Abbey in my imagination. As I wrote, the idea grew, and the manuscript along with it."

After his former English teacher, Alan Durband, showed the story to a publisher, the first of the 21 Redwall books appeared in 1986.

He said he chose animals as his characters because they were more popular with his target audience, kids aged 9 to 15. His inspirations included the books he read as a child, such as Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" and the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey."

"A dirty rat, a sly fox, a slippery snake, an heroic mouse, a homely mouse, a friendly badger … these are all prevalent in the folk tales of Europe and they suit the medieval setting well," Jacques said.

Born in Liverpool, Jacques left school at 15 to become a merchant seaman. Later he became a locomotive fireman, longshoreman, police officer, standup comedian, postmaster, and bus and truck driver. He also sang in a folk group, the Liverpool Fishermen, with his two brothers, and was a broadcaster for BBC's Radio Merseyside.

Jacques is survived by his wife, Maureen, and their two sons.

-- Associated Press

 

Reynolds Price, Southern writer and professor, dies at 77

 
Reynolds Price, an award-winning author who served on the Duke University faculty for more than 50 years, died Thursday in Durham, N.C., after suffering a heart attack. He was 77.

In 1962, Price earned the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel for his book, "A Long and Happy Life." He published numerous books after that, including the novel "Kate Vaiden," which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.

His third memoir, "Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back," was published in 2009.

Price was a Rhodes Scholar. He took a teaching job at Duke in 1958 and remained on the faculty for 53 years.

More later at www.latimes.com/obits

-- Associated Press

Photo: Reynolds Price at Duke University in 2009. Credit: Sara D. Davis / For The Times

Wilfrid Sheed, novelist and satirical essayist, dies at 80

Novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed, the English-born American satirical writer known for tackling jazz, baseball, and journalism, died Wednesday at a nursing home in Massachusetts. He was 80.

The cause was an infection called urosepsis, said stepdaughter Phoebe Alexis Ungerer. She said he also had long suffered from polio and more recently cancer of the mouth.

Born in London on Dec. 27, 1930, to prominent Catholic publishers, Sheed was the author of a number of books, including "A Middle Class Education," ''Square's Progress," and "People Will Always Be Kind." He often wrote about a broad range of subjects, from characters wrestling with their Roman Catholic beliefs to his own battles with disease and addiction in his memoir, "In Love With Daylight: A Memory of Recovery."

His last book, "The House That George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole and a Crew of About Fifty," was published in 2007 and was billed as a history of American popular music.

Sheed also was part of a team that won a 1987 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for "The Voice: The Columbia Years, 1943-1952," performed by Frank Sinatra.

"He was a beautiful and understanding and wonderful person," said Ungerer from her home in Great Barrington, Mass.

Ungerer said Sheed recently had moved from a Long Island nursing home to one in Great Barrington.

Sheed's family moved to the U.S. from England 10 years after his birth to escape World War II and settled in a suburb of Philadelphia. He later returned to England to attend Lincoln College, Oxford, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees.

He is survived by his second wife, Miriam Ungerer Sheed, who lived with him for many years on Long Island. He is also survived by a sister, Rosemary Luke Sheed Middleton; three children from his first marriage to Maria Bulitt Darlington that ended in divorce; two stepdaughters and four grandchildren.

The family said Sheed's last wish was to have his gravestone engraved with the words, "He wrote some good sentences."

-- Associated Press

Playwright Romulus Linney dies at 80

Romulus Linney, a prolific playwright whose work included stories set in Appalachia and the Nuremberg trials, has died in New York. He was 80.

Linney died Saturday at his home in Germantown, N.Y., said his wife, Laura Callanan. The cause was lung cancer.

Linney, father of actress Laura Linney, wrote more than 30 plays that covered a number of subjects. Some of his works were set in Appalachia, which he was familiar with through his youth growing up in the South. Others were historical dramas, some looking at moments in time like the Nuremberg trials or the Vietnam War and others taken from the lives of public figures like the poet Lord Byron or Frederick II, a king of Prussia.

Linney also had the ability to write the voice of women particularly well, Callanan said.

"When I first saw his plays as a student years ago, walking in you wouldn't know if the playwright was a man or woman," she said.

Most of Linney's work appeared in regional theater and off-Broadway, with one play appearing in a Broadway theater.  He also taught at schools including Columbia and Princeton universities, Hunter College and the New School.

Callanan said he had been working on a novel at the time of his death, and had completed the libretto for an opera based on one of his plays.

--Associated Press

Photo: Romulus Linney, left, with Robyn Cohen during reading of "Bus Stop" at Independence Community College in Independence, Kan., in 2003. Credit: AP Photo/Independence Daily Reporter, Karen Mikols

Argentine writer and singer Maria Elena Walsh dies at 80

 
Maria Elena Walsh, an Argentine writer, poet and singer who entertained generations of children with whimsical songs and books, died Monday of heart failure. She was 80.

Walsh had been suffering from several chronic diseases before she died at a clinic in Buenos Aires, Ricardo Pereira, spokesman of the Argentine Society of Writers and Composers, told the Associated Press.

The adventurous little turtle Manuelita and the goofy monkey Mono Liso were among the more well-known of Walsh's characters. Her songs, celebrated by folk singer Mercedes Sosa and Spanish crooner Joan Manuel Serrat, traveled across the Spanish-speaking world, inspiring children to sing along.

Born on Feb. 1, 1930, Walsh published her first poem when she was 15, and soon traveled to the U.S. and Europe, writing and performing.

She returned to Argentina in 1970 as a famous personality, and she was one of the few to openly challenge the 1976-83 military dictatorship, with songs such as "Oracion a la Justicia" (Prayer for Justice) and "Venceremos," a Spanish version of the U.S. civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome."

By 1979, she wrote an open letter published in the newspaper Clarin that directly criticized the military regime's censorship, comparing Argentina to a preschool of cowering children with broken pencils. It was republished in 1993 in "Desventuras en el Pais-Jardin-de-Infantes" (Misadventures in the Preschool Country).

Walsh wrote more than 40 books in all, including works for adults, TV scripts and plays.

Even among themes apparently intended for children, Argentines found political messages, such as in the song "El Pais del Nomeacuerdo" (The Country of Idontremember), which was later used as the theme song for "The Official Story," the Argentine film that won the 1985 Academy Award for best foreign language film.

In a rare 2008 interview with the newspaper Pagina12, Walsh said she hoped to be remembered as someone who tried to bring joy to others.

"I never thought it was necessary to add a moral to the end of a song, nor tell the children to behave themselves. I was never interested in taking on the job of a mother," she said.

-- Associated Press

Photo: Maria Elena Walsh in Buenos Aires. Credit: Luciana Betesh / AFP / Getty Images

British author Dick King-Smith, whose children's book was basis of 1995 movie 'Babe,' dies at 88

British children's author Dick King-Smith, whose novel "The Sheep-Pig" inspired the hit Hollywood movie "Babe," has died in England. He was 88.

His publisher, Random House Children's Books, says the writer died in his sleep early Tuesday morning at his home near Bath, about 100 miles west of London, after suffering from poor health in recent years.

King-Smith was honored by Queen Elizabeth II when he received an OBE last year for his services to children's literature.

The writer worked for 20 years as a farmer before he trained as a primary school teacher. In his 50s, he began to write his first story, "The Fox Busters," about chickens taking their revenge on foxes.

He had since published over 100 books, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide.

-- Associated Press