NYT Books

She enjoyed a lifelong reputation as a glittering, annihilating humorist. For her epitaph, she suggested, “Excuse My Dust.”

Although her books, written in the dialect of the Deep South, established her as one of the foremost writers of Black folklore, she died in obscurity.

Her landmark book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was among the first 20th-century autobiographies of a Black woman to reach a wide readership.

An iconoclastic journalist, she was known for her war coverage and her aggressive, revealing interviews with the powerful.

She was recognized in 1945 for three “Soñetos de la Muerte” (“Sonnets of Death”), which were first published in Chile in 1922.

She overcame blindness and deafness, but insisted that there was nothing miraculous about her achievements.

She caused controversy with books like “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” published in 1963, which grew out of her coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker.

In “Kin,” the follow-up to the best-selling “An American Marriage,” she looks back on the place and the people that forged her.

The best-selling author Marie Lu recommends thrilling reads that ground enchanting adventures in recognizable settings.

She was a towering figure in Soviet literature who was once silenced in a Stalinist literary purge.