12 Authors Who Died in 2022

2022 may not have been the bounce-back year we had all hoped for, and sadly, the voices of these beloved and esteemed authors will only be heard in the works they’ve left behind.

As always, this is not intended to be a comprehensive list or an attempt to highlight “the best” or “most important” writers who passed in 2022. 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.

Nancy Milford, 84
Born: March 26, 1938, Dearborn, MI
Died: March 29, 2022, Manhattan, KS

To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.

Nancy Lee Milford wrote two essential biographies, 1970’s Zelda, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda Fitzgerald, and 2001’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, about the poet and playwright who was a renowned social figure and noted feminist during the Roaring Twenties. Zelda, the “original flapper” and literary muse of her husband, has her troubled story brought to life, including reports by psychiatrists who treated her for schizophrenia and saw her institutionalized in the ‘30s and ’40s. Milford was also a professor, teaching at institutions that included the University of Michigan, Princeton University, Brown University, Vassar College, Bennington College, Briarcliff College, and Hunter College, where she held the position of distinguished lecturer. [Image sourced from Medium.com.]

Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, 93
Born: January 21, 1929, Mercedes, TX
Died: April 19, 2022, Cedar Park, TX

People say to do research; my research is reading and talking and listening to people. I’ve always found that to be very instructive for me. … That’s what I want to do, convince the reader that the writer knows what he is talking about or presenting or showing, whether it’s food or dress or motive, expression, just make it as realistic as possible. Not real but realistic.

Dr. Hinojosa-Smith, a professor of literature at the University of Texas at Austin for 35 years, was a novelist, essayist, and poet best known for his Klail City Death Trip book series, which includes 15 books published between 1973 and 2006. Growing up with Spanish as his native language, his stories explore the Mexican-American experience in Texas, as told through the inner-workings of the fictional town of Klail City. Hinojosa joined the Army when he was 17 and served in the Korean War, which inspired some of his work, including 1978’s Korean Love Songs and 1993’s The Useless Servants. But it was the Klail City Death Trip cycle that made him a “major figure in Chicano literature” (New York Times). Most of Hinojosa’s work was written in Spanish, though he translated his own books and wrote some in English, publishing over 20 books, fiction and nonfiction, in his career as a writer. [Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.]

Valerie Boyd, 58
Born: December 11, 1963, Atlanta, GA
Died: February 12, 2022, Atlanta, GA

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. ―Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

Best-known for her biography of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, author of 1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Valerie Boyd’s body of writing was predominantly journals and articles in myriad publications. Her 2003 book, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, took nearly a decade to write and earned Boyd widespread critical acclaim. Born in Atlanta, Boyd was an associate professor teaching narrative nonfiction and literary journalism at the University of Georgia, and she was the university’s Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Before that, Boyd was the Arts Editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, founded a journal and magazine, and saw her work published in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Creative Nonfiction, and African American Review, among many others. [Image sourced from Twitter.]

Jim Murphy, 74
Born: September 25, 1947, Kearny, NJ
Died: May 1, 2022, Woodstock, NY

When you spend a year or two researching a subject, and you’re still fascinated by it, that’s a good indicator that what you’re doing will appeal to others, as well.

Placing his young readers squarely in the action through first-person narration, Jim Murphy wrote histories of the tractor, wacky inventions, and various historical occurrences for children and young adults. After working as a children’s book editor for years, he decided he wanted to be on the front end of the process, writing Weird and Wacky Inventions in 1978. In all, Murphy penned more than 35 fiction and nonfiction books, the vast majority detailing moments in American history, including 1990’s The Boys’ War: Confederate and Union soldiers talk about the Civil War; 1995’s The Great Fire about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and 2003’s An American Plague: the true and terrifying story of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. [Photo: U.S. National Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.]

George Lamming, 94
Born: June 8, 1927, Carrington, Barbados
Died: June 4, 2022, Barbados

The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up.

George William Lamming wrote six books between 1953 and 1972: In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, Of Age and Innocence, Season of Adventure, Water with Berries, and Natives of My Person. Lamming’s work was informed by his being part of the “Windrush generation,” those who migrated to Britain after the British government ruled they were British citizens in 1948. His debut was published in London and won a Somerset Maugham Award and helped earn him a Guggenheim Fellowship. He traveled extensively over his lifetime, but moved back to his birthplace after a decade in Britain to become an educator. That work also had him travel, as Lamming served as a visiting professor at many US universities, including Duke and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his novels, Lamming also published collections of essays, including 1995’s Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II – Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual. [Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.]

Shirley Hughes, 94
Born: July 16, 1927, West Kirby, UK
Died: February 25, 2022, London, UK

What I want children to do is linger, turn the page, see themselves as readers long before they can read.

Winifred Shirley Hughes illustrated more than 200 books in her career, which launched with My Naughty Little Sister, written by Dorothy Edwards and published in 1952. Hughes wrote and illustrated more than 70 books on her own, the first of hers being Lucy & Tom’s Day, published in 1960. Hughes’ worldwide book sales surpassed 12 million books, her most famous being 1977’s Dogger, about a toy dog who was lost and then reclaimed at a “jumble sale.” Hughes wrote her first novel, Hero on a Bicycle, at the age of 84. Hughes was honored by Queen Elizabeth II with Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017 for services to literature. [Photo by Transangst, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.]

Robert Goolrick, 73
Born: August 4, 1948, Charlottesville, VA
Died: April 29, 2022, Lynchburg, VA

I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine. ―The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

Robert Cooke Goolrick took to writing after being fired as an advertising executive in the mid-2000s. His 2007 memoir, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life, details his southern upbringing, complete with accounts of substance abuse and sexual assault. He likens writing the book to saving what was left of his life, and it resonated, selling more than five million copies. His other published works include 2009’s A Reliable Wife, 2012’s Heading Out to Wonderful, 2015’s The Fall of Princes, and 2018’s The Dying of the Light. Goolrick was well-received in France, where he was awarded the Prix Fitzgerald (for The Fall of Princes) and the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle (for Heading Out to Wonderful). [Photo by slowking4, GFDL 1.2 via Wikimedia Commons.]

Ashley Bryan, 98
Born: July 13, 1923, Harlem, NY
Died: February 4, 2022, Sugar Land, TX

If I go into a museum, it doesn’t matter how often a work of art has been written about or thought about, I am going to discover something that is my own, which will be new. You always must be discovering, rediscovering. That’s what the world of art means. It means constant mystery in the discovery, the rediscovery.

Born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx, Ashley Frederick Bryan was an established artist when he decided to apply his artistic talents and knowledge of African traditions and stories to create children’s books, largely focused on the African-American experience — something that was not prevalent in children’s literature in the mid-‘60s. Working as an illustrator on many titles, and both writer and illustrator on many others, Bryan has more than 50 titles to his name, including The Ox of the Wonderful Horns and Other African Folktales; Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum; Lion and the Ostrich Chicks and Other African Folk Tales; and Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life by Ashley Bryan. His work earned more than a dozen awards, including nine Coretta Scott King Awards for writing and/or illustration and a Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his contribution to American children’s literature in 2009. [Image sourced from Wikipedia.]

Ann Arensberg, 84
Born: February 21, 1937, Pittsburgh, PA
Died: January 14, 2022, Sharon, CT

A motto was stenciled on the headboard in fading black letters, N’ESPÈRE RIEN, ‘Hope for nothing,’ the marrow of the Huguenot religion: only God knows which sinners will be saved; therefore hope for salvation is an illusion. —Incubus

Ann Arensberg’s path to being an author started in Havana, Cuba, where she grew up into her early 20s. After earning a Master’s degree in French literature from Harvard College in 1962, Arensberg worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as an editor at book publishers E. P. Dutton and Viking Press. She was in her 30s when she published her first short story, “Art History,” but it wasn’t until 1980 that she published her first book, Sister Wolf, when she was 43. That novel won her an American Book Award for First Novel, and she published two more books after that, 1986’s Group Sex, based on an earlier short story of hers, and Incubus in 1999. [Image sourced from the New York Times (Joyce Ravid).]

David Dalton, 80
Born: January 15, 1942, London, UK
Died: July 11, 2022, Manhattan, NY

Adolescents, like actors, haven’t quite decided who to be (at least not who to be forever), and to “play” oneself, to put oneself on as an other is the teenager’s favorite form of recreation. Jimmy didn’t only play himself, he played us as well. —James Dean, The Mutant King

A founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, John David Dalton was a British born-American author whose most notable works include the biographies of many of music and film’s more colorful characters, including 1974’s James Dean: The Mutant King: A Biography; 1971’s Janis about Janis Joplin; and 2012’s Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan. Dalton also helped many celebrities white their autobiographies, including Paul Anka’s My Way, Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back, and Steven Tyler’s Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? [Photo by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty images.]

Sara Suleri Goodyear, 68
Born: June 12, 1953, Karachi, Pakistan
Died: March 21, 2022, Bellingham, WA

One’s aesthetic changes once one has a child. ―Meatless Days

Sara Suleri Goodyear was a professor of English at Yale University, where her fields of study and teaching included Romantic and Victorian poetry and where she was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Suleri’s memoir, Meatless Days, was published in 1989 and, as the New York Times writes, “is viewed as an important work … often cited as a foundational work of post-colonial literature.” She published two other books, The Rhetoric of English India in 1992 and Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy in 2003. The latter is a tribute to her father, Pakistani political journalist Z. A. Suleri, who died in 1999. [Image sourced from Flickr (photo by Jamal Ashiqain).]

Ron Goulart, 89
Born: January 13, 1933, Berkeley, CA
Died: January 14, 2022, Ridgefield, CT

Everyone grows and matures…even a cyborg dog. —Tin Angel

Publishing at least 180 books, in addition to comic books and adaptations, Ronald Joseph Goulart was a writing chameleon who used nearly a dozen pseudonyms and was the ghostwriter for a TekWar series of books “authored” by William Shatner in the late ‘80s–early ‘90s. Mostly exploring science fiction themes, Goulart’s work was rife with humor, robots, and historical and fictional characters from other works. And while he never achieved massive popularity, he was uncannily prolific and able to find work as a commercial freelance writer, a romance novelist, and writing novelizations of television programs. His best known work, 1970’s After Things Fell Apart, is an apt encapsulation of most of the things that made his writing unique: it’s a futuristic tale (set in 1995) of a detective investigating murders by Mankill, a radical lesbian organization. [Photo by Houari Boumedienne, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.]