12 Authors Who Died in 2021

As we move on from what was a difficult and taxing year, let’s pay tribute to 12 writers, icons, and authors who died in 2021. Though they’ve left us, their voices will forever sing through their published works.

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

It should go without saying that this is not intended to be a comprehensive list or an attempt to highlight “the best” or “most important” writers who passed in 2021. It’s simply meant to pay homage to 12 writers who have written their last, and it’s your opportunity to add a contribution in the comment section in remembrance of the writers who passed who meant something to you.

Anne Rice, 80
Born: October 4, 1941, New Orleans, LA
Died: December 11, 2021, Rancho Mirage, CA

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

Howard Allen Frances O’Brien, AKA Anne Rice, (yes, her mother named her Howard to give her an “advantage” in life) launched her literary career with 1976’s Interview with the Vampire, the first of the Vampire Chronicles, a trio of books that ultimately spawned two movie adaptations are among her best-known works. Selling over 100 million books throughout her career, Rice takes her place as one the biggest-selling authors in modern history. In addition to her gothic fiction, Rice penned fictionalized accounts of Jesus’ life as well as erotic fiction under the name Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure. [Photo: by Anne Rice: Public Domain]

Eric Carle, 91
Born: June 25, 1929, Syracuse, NY
Died: May 23, 2021, Northampton, MA

Let’s put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

Published in 1969, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar has sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, has been translated into 70+ languages, and is part of a body of work that includes more than 70 titles. Carle has sold more than 170 million books over a writing career that spanned five decades, and won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (now the Children’s Literature Legacy Award) from the American Library Association in 2003 in recognition of his contribution to children’s literature and will be remembered as one of the most beloved children’s authors who died in 2021. [Photo: Fred Rockwood, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Etel Adnan, 96
Born: February 24, 1925, Beirut, Lebanon
Died: November 14, 2021, Paris, France

My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Etal Adnan left the country to study in Paris and the US before returning to her home country in 1972. She fled the city (and the civil war) in 1975, returning to Paris, where she wrote Sitt Marie Rose, based on a true story from the smoldering Lebanese civil war and which is still read in classrooms around the world. Adnan wrote numerous books — novels, poetry, and nonfiction — in English and French, with her last books published in 2020. As well as being a notable female author who died in 2021, she was acclaimed for her visual art, which include oil paintings, films, and tapestries. [Photo: Nanwieser, Own work,CC BY-SA 3.0]

Jean “Binta” Breeze, 65
Born: March 11, 1956, Hanover, Jamaica
Died: August 4, 2021, Sandy Bay, Jamaica

I want to make words music, move beyond language into sound.

Born Jean Lumsden in rural Jamaica, Jean “Binta” Breeze was known for her dub poetry that spoke to the struggles and exploitation of women, political oppression, and mental illness. According to the New York Times, Binta got her start when she heard Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” one day, which inspired her to head to Montego Bay. While there, she was invited to a party in honor of Haile Selassie, revered by Rastafarians (she was a Rastafarian teacher), and was asked to recite a poem. A renowned dub poet was in attendance, loved her performance, “And in a month, I had the first recording played on radio in Jamaica as the first female dub poet.”

Ved Mehta, 86
Born: March 21, 1934, Lahore, British India
Died: January 9, 2021, New York, NY

With respect to determination, often the talent will drive you. If you have talent, you have an obligation to that talent.

Born in India and blind from the age of three, Ved Parkash Mehta wrote for the New Yorker for three decades and is credited as being the most prominent writer responsible for introducing India to America. In addition to his work with the New Yorker, Mehta published a dozen books and a sprawling autobiography, titled Continents of Exile, which was published in 12 installments between 1972 and 2004. Mehta received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1971 and 1977, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1982, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

Joan Didion, 87
Born: December 5, 1934, Sacramento, CA
Died: December 23, 2021, New York, NY

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Born in Sacramento California, Joan Didion’s arc as a writer spans myriad genres and subjects, toggling between fiction and nonfiction. In her essay collections in the late ’60s and ’70s that explored the counterculture and popular culture, she embarked on “New Journalism,” while her post-war writing in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post precursed her nonfiction books, Salvador and Miami, in the ’80s. But it was her 2005 nonfiction book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that earned her a National Book Award for Nonfiction (and finalist status for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize). In 2013, Didion was awarded a National Medal of Arts, presented by President Barack Obama and will be remembered as one of the more storied female authors who died in 2021. [Photo: David Shankbone, own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Lawrence Otis Graham, 59
Born: December 25, 1961, New York, NY
Died: February 19, 2021, Chappaqua, NY

This is the problem with being raised in the Black upper middle class. You are living in a white world but you have to hold on to Black culture. You have to please two groups. One group says you have sold out, and the other never quite accepts you.

Lawrence Otis Graham was a practicing lawyer in a Manhattan law firm and a New York Times best-selling author of 14 nonfiction books that explored politics, race, education, and class in America. He published Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class in 1999, which was turned into a TV series in 2021, and his article, “Invisible Man,” was the product of his wiping his Princeton and Harvard degrees off his resume to take a job in a restaurant at the Greenwich Country Club in Connecticut. “Quite frankly,” Graham writes, “I got into this country club the only way that a Black man like me could. As a $7-an-hour busboy.”

Joan Walsh Anglund, 95
Born: January 3, 1926, Hinsdale, IL
Died: March 9, 2021, Litchfield County, CT

A bird does not sing because he has an answer. He sings because he has a song.

In 1958, Joan Walsh Anglund’s A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You was published after her husband found the manuscript in a drawer and encouraged her to complete it. The book, which included Anglund’s children’s story and her illustrations, sold four million copies and was named one of The New York Times‘ 10 Best Illustrated Books of the Year. Anglund never looked back, producing 120 children’s books and selling more than 50 million copies worldwide. Anglund also wrote poetry, including two volumes of children’s poems and another three for adults. (As a sidenote, the quote included here is often mis-attributed to Maya Angelou, who was fond of Anglund’s work.)

Richard Stolley, 92
Born: October 3, 1928, Pekin, IL
Died: June 16, 2021, Evanston, IL

Whether or not kids eat well, are nurtured and have a roof over their heads is not just a consequence of how their parents behave. It is also a responsibility of society — but now apparently a diminishing one.

Enjoying a six-decade career at Time Inc., Richrd Stolley was a reporter, bureau chief, senior editor, and finally assistant managing editor at Life magazine, covering major stories including the civil rights movement and the space race. Stolley is also famous for acquiring the Zapruder film — 23 seconds of silent, home footage of the Kennedy assassination — for Life magazine in 1963. In 1974, two years after Life ceased its weekly publication, Stolley headed a spin-off the “People” section of Time magazine, serving as editor of People magazine, which quickly boasted a “pass along” readership of 14 million and became the most profitable magazine in the country.

Larry McMurtry, 84
Born: June 3, 1936, Archer City, TX
Died: March 25, 2021, Archer City, TX

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.

Larry McMurtry has more than 30 novels, 30 screenplays, and various books of essays, memoirs, and history to his name. His greatest commercial success came with 1985’s “anti-western,” Lonesome Dove, which earned a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a popular TV mini-series that won seven Emmys (it was nominated for 18). His books Horseman, Pass By; The Last Picture Show; and Terms of Endearment were all adapted to film, and he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, making him one of the more famous authors who died in 2021. [Photo: New York Times, fair use.]

Lucinda Franks, 74
Born: July 16, 1946, Chicago, IL
Died: May 5, 2021, Hopewell Junction, NY

The simple tableau is so rich with meaning that whether represented on the mantelpiece or in the mind, it seems suspended, complete unto itself, somewhere in eternity.

Competing in the male-dominated field of journalism, Lucinda Franks embedded herself in a civil war in Northern Ireland (against the orders of her boss) in the early ’70s and made a name for herself as a serious reporter and writer. Soon after, she covered the story of The Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist organization in Greenwich Village in New York, which ultimately earned her a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting — making her the first woman to receive that award. Franks also wrote several books, including 2007’s My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir, which told the story of her father, who worked as an American spy in WWII. [Photo: Rodrigo Fernández, own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.]

Eric Jerome Dickey, 59
Born: July 7, 1961, Memphis, TN
Died: January 3, 2021, Los Angeles, CA

It’s impossible to explain creativity. It’s like asking a bird, “How do you fly?” You just do.

Eric Jerome Dickey launched his writing career in 1996 with the novel Sister, Sister, which features his hallmark strong female characters with distinct voices. Dickey was prolific, publishing 30 novels between 1996 and 2021, including the posthumous release of The Son of Mr. Suleman in April 2021. Known for crafting authentic — often sexy — characters and situations, Dickey also wrote a graphic novel, Storm, which won the Glyph Comics Awards in 2007.