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An influential arts administrator and educator, he was a trusted confidant to countless writers, notably Philip Roth.

By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.

His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in 1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers.

An Oxford professor and renowned critic, he was pugnacious, fearless and disdainful of the received wisdom of his intellectual milieu.

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.

John D. MacDonald was eerily prescient about the risks of human-driven climate disasters in the region.

The novelist and musician is a voracious reader of books in translation. In “This Year,” he annotates the literary lyrics to 365 of his own songs.

A longtime columnist for The Washington Post, he also wrote dozens of books about basketball, baseball, tennis, football and the Olympics.

Writing for anglers and amateurs alike, he found that the sport can reveal as much about people as it does about fish.

The writer and YouTube star on trying to get back to the experiences that make us feel alive.