Literary obituaries: June 4, 2025

Here are the literary deaths that either occurred recently or popped into the news recently, starting with the most distant.

• Holmes Rolston III, author of essays and books on environmental ethics including Philosophy Gone Wild: Environmental Ethics, died February 12 at age ninety-two (The New York Times).

• Lynn Freed, author of darkly comic essays, short stories, and novels such as Home Ground, died May 9 at age seventy-nine (NYT).

• Alice Notley, a poet who published more than forty books including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Mysteries of Small Houses, died May 19 at age seventy-nine (NYT). 

• Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher and author of the moral theory book After Virtue, died May 21 at age ninety-six (NYT).

• Peter David, who wrote sci-fi and fantasy in a number of mediums, including eleven years as the storyteller behind The Incredible Hulk comics, died May 24 at age sixty-eight (NYT).

• Pierre Nora, a scholar who explored what the ways that a society remembers and writes about its history reveals about it, died Monday at age ninety-three (NYT).

• Edmund White, a writer, playwright, and essayist who co-wrote the first — and pioneering — edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, died Tuesday at age eighty-five (The Guardian).