NYT Books

An indefatigable gardener, she was one of the first nutritionists to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers’ health.

Didion’s influential account of the era, “The White Album,” captures the ripples of terror provoked by the 1969 murders.

He won a National Book Award for “Spartina,” beating out novels by Amy Tan and E.L. Doctorow. A longtime professor, he lived for a time without electricity on an island.

In novels like “The Glitter Dome” and nonfiction works like “The Onion Field,” he took a harsh, unglamorous look at the realities of law enforcement.

The writer is remembered, above all, for her ruthlessness. But when I went looking for it, I found something much more complicated.

His savage fiction, set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, demonstrated his belief that “violence is the most elemental truth of life.”

In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature.

In “Farewell to Manzanar,” she wrote about the years she and her family were imprisoned in a camp for Japanese Americans. It became the basis for a TV movie.

Nearly six years after becoming a literary heavyweight with “Read with Jenna,” she’s starting her own publishing venture with Penguin Random House.

Your imaginary audience has a note taped to them: “I can’t read. I can’t talk. I don’t care about stories, plots or characters. What do you have for me?”