Good Authors Died in 2016

We lost some good writers in 2016 - Jim Harrison, Harper Lee, and Pat Conroy among others.  I've gotten more entertainment from reading Jim Harrison's  work than probably any other author.  A great poet and storyteller, his way with words could always enthrall.  In Legends of the Fall he set the story up this way: "Late in October in 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana to Alberta to enlist in the Great War.  An old Cheyenne name One Stab rode with them to return with the horses in tow because the horses were blooded and their father did not think it fitting for his sons to ride off to war on nags."

Then there's this line from his prose poem "Late Spring."Because of the late, cold wet spring the fruit of greenness is suddenly upon us so that in Montana you can throw yourself down just about anywhere on a green, grassy bed, snooze on the riverbank and wake to a yellow-romped warbler flittering close to your head then sipping a little standing water from a moose track."

Then there's Harper Lee's famous book To Kill a Mockingbird that grabs you from the beginning and doesn't release you until the end.  But that's not really the end because you keep thinking about it on and on.  Atticus Finch and Boo Radley were two memorable characters that stay with you.

And Pat Conroy.  The Great Santini is called a novel but is apparently closely patterns Conroy's real-life father, a hard-nosed Marine fighter pilot, a warrior without a war, who ran his family with a strict Marine Corps discipline.  Conroy exposes the love-hate relationship between him and his father.

Some authors stand out in my estimation and three of them left us this year.  I still review a lot of books for Western Writers of America and right now on my desk is The Winchester: The Gun that Built an American Dynasty.  Written by a distant relative of the family, she admits early on the book is not a technical history but is the story of the Winchester family.  One part jumped out when I read through it.  One of the descendants "Sarah Winchester was ridden with guilt because her fortune came from Native Americans killed by settlers of the West with their Winchesters."  After consulting with mediums, she decided to build the huge mansion in San Jose, California where "miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls... supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her."