Susan Chitty

Susan Chitty, author of several biographies, died July 13. She was 91.

Born Susan Elspeth White, Chitty was the daughter of the novelist Antonia White, and her stepfather Tom was a copywriter. She studied at Oxford University, where she met her husband, Sir Thomas Chitty, a novelist. Chitty began her writing career at Vogue, and while raising four children she began to write biographies. The first, The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty, about Anna Sewell, was published in 1971. Her next book was a biography of Charles Kingsley, a minister and writer. Her other subjects included the Welsh artist Gwen John and Chitty’s own mother, in a memoir that detailed the mistreatment Chitty suffered from her mother as a child.

Gary B. Nash

Gary B. Nash, a noted historian of colonial and Revolutionary America, died July 29, in Los Angeles. He was 88.

Nash served three years in the Navy in between earning his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. at Princeton University. He then began teaching at UCLA in 1966 and remained there for almost 30 years. During that time, he wrote several books that examined the role of Blacks, Native Americans, and working-class whites in 18th-century America. After leaving UCLA in 1994, Nash became embroiled in a controversy regarding new, proposed history standards for elementary and secondary schools that he helped draft. Conservative politicians and pundits attacked the proposals, saying they reflected a liberal bias. A revised proposal was later accepted by many school districts. Among Nash’s books were the biographies Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist and Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull, co-written with Graham Russell Gao Hodges.

Eloise Greenfield

Eloise Greenfield, a prolific writer of books for children, died August 5, in Washington, D.C. She was 92.

A North Carolina native who moved with her family to Washington, D.C., Greenfield left college after two years and took a job with the U.S. Patent Office. After she left the Patent Office in 1960, she began pursuing a writing career. In 1971, she joined the D.C. Black Writers’ Workshop and focused her writing on books for children. Greenfield published her first book the next year and a biography of Rosa Parks in 1973. Focusing on Black history, her other subjects were Paul Robeson and Mary McCleod Bethune. Greenfield also wrote poetry and fiction.

Donald Kagan

Donald Kagan, a historian who focused on ancient Greece, died August 6, in Washington, D.C. He was 89.

Born in Lithuania, Kagan emigrated to New York with his family when he was two. He earned graduate degrees in history from Brown and Ohio State University and taught at several colleges before arriving at Yale in 1969. He remained there for the rest of his academic career. Best known for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, his other books included a biography of Pericles and Thucydides: The Reinvention of History. In 2002, Kagan received the National Humanities Medal.

Joe Morella

Joe Morella, a Hollywood journalist and biographer of film stars, died August 13, in San Diego. He was 81.

After working for Universal Pictures in publicity, Morella began writing for Variety in the late 1960s. In 2011, he and Frank Seger, another Hollywood journalist, started the website Classic Movie Chat.com – The Golden Era of Hollywood. As a biographer, Morella co-wrote several biographies with Edward Z. Epstein, including Loretta Young: An Extraordinary Life; Forever Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball; and Paul and Joanne: A Biography of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Morella was also the sole author of a book on Marlon Brando.

Stephen B. Oates

Stephen B. Oates, a historian who specialized in the Civil War era, died August 20, in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was 85.

After earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, Oates began teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He taught there for almost 30 years and retired in 1997. He focused on biography because, he wrote, “the best biography—pure biography—was a storytelling art that brought people alive again.” He wrote what he called a “Civil War quartet,” individual biographies of Nat Turner, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. Let The Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights book award in 1983. Oates’s career, however, was not without some controversy. During the early 1990s, he faced allegations that he had plagiarized material for three of his books, including his Lincoln biography. Oates strongly denied the charge. In what The New York Times called an “ambiguous ruling,” the American Historical Association said Oates had not committed plagiarism “as it is conventionally understood,” but it did cite a high dependence on “the structure, distinctive language and rhetorical strategies of other scholars and sources.” Among his books, Oates also wrote biographies of Clara Barton and William Faulkner and edited Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on Their Art.