Hungarian author Imre Kertesz, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature "for fiction largely drawn from his experience as a teenage prisoner in Nazi concentration camps," died today, the New York Times reported. He was 86. His novel Fateless "finally appeared in 1975 after a decade-long struggle to have it published" and was largely ignored, but "was later incorporated into Hungary's high school curriculum and Kertesz was awarded several state honors."
Becoming a Nobel laureate "suddenly propelled him to domestic and international fame," the Times noted. "His infrequent personal appearances in Hungary in wake of the Nobel Prize were a massive success, with hundreds of people standing in line for hours to get his autograph on their copies of his books."
Other books by Kertesz include Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker, Dossier K and Liquidation. His Hungarian publisher, Magveto Kiado, said that during the last months of his life, Kertesz helped prepare The Viewer, a selection of his diary entries between 1991 and 2001, which was published this month in Hungary.
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Novelist and television writer Earl Hamner Jr., "who drew on warm memories of his Depression childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to create the enormously popular 1970s television series The Waltons," died March 25, the New York Times reported. He was 92. In 1971, Hamner took an incident from his novel Spencer's Mountain and rewrote it as a TV special called The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, which CBS picked it up as a series. His other books included Fifty Roads to Town, You Can't Get There from Here, The Avocado Drive Zoo and Generous Women: An Appreciation.