Deaths
- January 4 - Irving Layton, age 93, Canadian poet
- January 16 - Jan Mark, 62, British children's writer
- January 30 - Wendy Wasserstein, 55, American playwright
- February 2 - Chris Doty, 39, dramatist
- February 4 - Betty Friedan, 85, feminist writer
- February 8 - Michael Gilbert, 93, British crime writer
- February 11 - Peter Benchley, 65, American novelist
- February 17 - Sybille Bedford, 94, novelist and non-fiction writer
- February 20 - Lucjan Wolanowski, 86, Polish writer, journalist and traveller
- February 21
- Gennadiy Aygi, 71, Chuvashian poet and translator
- Theodore Draper, 93, historian
- February 22 - Hilde Domin, 96, German writer
- February 24 - Octavia E. Butler, 59, American science fiction writer
- February 25 - Margaret Gibson, 57, Canadian novelist and short story writer
- March 27 - Stanisław Lem, 84, Polish science fiction writer
- March 30 - John McGahern, 73, novelist, dramatist and short story writer
- April 6 - Leslie Norris, age 84, Anglo-Welsh poet and author
- April 13 - Muriel Spark, 88, novelist
- April 25 - Jane Jacobs, 89, urban planning critic and activist
- May 9 - Jerzy Ficowski, 81, poet, writer and translator
- May 17 - Clare Boylan, 58, Irish novelist
- May 18 - Gilbert Sorrentino, 77, novelist and poet
- June 17 - James McClure, age 66, crime writer
- June 28 - Nigel Cox, 55, New Zealand novelist
- July 17 - Mickey Spillane, 88, crime writer
- July 28 - David Gemmell, 57, British fantasy novelist
- August 21 - S. Yizhar, 89, Israeli novelist
- August 30 - Naguib Mahfouz, 94, Egyptian novelist, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature
- September 1 - György Faludy, 95, Hungarian poet, writer and translator
- September 12 - Edna Staebler CM, 100, Canadian author and award-winning literary journalist
- November 1 - William Styron, 81, American novelist
- November 4 - Nelson S. Bond, 97, American writer
- November 9 - Ellen Willis, 64, American journalist and critic
- November 10 - Jack Williamson, 98, American science fiction author
- November 13 - G. Gordon Strong, 92, Canadian-American publisher
- November 15 - George G. Blackburn MC, 90, Canadian author of The Guns of Normandy
- November 23
- Jesús Blancornelas, 70, Mexican journalist, founding editor of Zeta magazine
- Richard Clements, 78, British journalist
- November 24
- William Diehl, 81, American author (Primal Fear, Sharky's Machine)
- Phyllis Fraser, 90, American actress, writer, and publisher
- George W. S. Trow, 63, American writer and media critic
- November 27 - Bebe Moore Campbell, 56, Negro author (What You Owe Me)
Read more about this topic: 2006 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)