Kevin Jackson
Kevin Jackson, a writer and broadcaster with a broad range of interests, died May 10. He was 66.

After graduating from Oxford and a short teaching stint in the United States, Jackson settled in London. He covered the arts for the BBC and the Independent before turning to freelancing. His works ranged from a children’s story to a monograph of the moose, along with studies of classic films. His books included biographies of John Ruskin and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Jackson also wrote short biographical portraits that he published as Kindle Singles. His subjects included Sir Francis Drake and Christopher Columbus.

Stephen Graubard
Scholar and journal editor Stephen Graubard died May 27, in New York City. He was 96.

After a stint in the U.S. Army, Graubard earned degrees at George Washington and Harvard Universities. He taught at Harvard while still working on his graduate degrees, then moved to Brown University, where he taught history for almost 30 years. In 1961, Graubard became editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also edited collections of essays on a wide range of topics. As an author, Graubard’s books included a biography of Henry Kissinger; Burke, Disraeli, and Churchill: The Politics of Perseverance; and The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

Thomas Littlewood
Thomas Littlewood, a reporter and professor of journalism, died June 6, in Urbana, Illinois. He was 92.

Pursuing an interest in journalism that began in high school, Littlewood earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at Northwestern University. He then took a job at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he worked from 1953 to 1977, focusing on state and national politics. He also taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he served as head of the journalism department for 10 years. Littlefield wrote six books, including biographies of Illinois governor Henry Horner and journalist Arch Ward. He also wrote biographical entries of Richard Nixon and George McGovern for the 1973 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Lois Rudnick
Lois Rudnick, a former BIO member and a scholar who wrote extensively about New Mexico writer and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, died June 6, in Denver. She was 76.

Rudnick was interested in both teaching and writing from an early age. After completing her education at Brown and Tufts Universities, she taught English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for 25 years. She also chaired the American studies department at UMass. Rudnick focused much of her scholarship on Luhan, an Eastern socialite who moved to Taos, New Mexico, and hosted a salon that attracted artists and intellectuals. Rudnick wrote several books about Luhan and her circle, including a biography, and she also edited a version of Luhan’s autobiography. Rudnick’s last book, co-written with Jonathan Warm Day Coming, was a biography of the Taos Pueblo artist Eva Mirabal.

“Lois was a remarkable figure on the New Mexico literary landscape,” said BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris. “Serious, passionate—especially in politics—and scholarly, Lois had an incredibly wonderful sense of humor. A few years back she edited and published The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture. In promoting the book, she distributed red condoms with her book cover on it.” See her in action here.

Vance Trimble
Vance Trimble, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of several biographies, died June 16, in Wewoka, Oklahoma. He was 107.

Trimble began his newspaper career while still in high school and wrote for more than two dozen small-town papers before landing his first job at a major metropolitan newspaper in 1930. He was working for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain in 1959 when he won a Pulitzer for reporting on corruption in Congress, especially nepotism. His last job in journalism was as editor of the Kentucky Post. After retiring in 1979, Littlefield began to write books. His 1990 biography of Sam Walton was a bestseller. His other subjects included Fred Smith, founder of FedEx, Chris Whittle, and Will Rogers.

Janet Malcolm
Acclaimed journalist and author Janet Malcolm died June 16, in New York City. She was 86.

Born Jana Klara Wienerova in Prague, Malcolm and her family emigrated to the United States just before the outbreak of World War II. After earning a degree in English at the University of Michigan, Malcolm began writing for The New Republic. She wrote her most famous essays and profiles for The New Yorker. She developed a reputation for having a keen eye for detail and a precise writing style. She wrote on such topics as photography, psychoanalysis, and true crime. She also wrote about the relationship between journalists and biographers with their subjects and the nature of truth. Malcolm opened the book The Journalist and the Murderer with this line: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” In her examination of the biographical treatments of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm wrote, “The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.” Malcolm’s other books included The Crime of Sheila McGough and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

You can hear BIO member Carl Rollyson’s thoughts on Malcolm and her work in this episode of his podcast.