How do you summarize a life when it has ended? Margalit Fox, a senior writer at The New York Times who has penned more than 1,000 obituaries over the last decade, faces that challenge almost every day.
Approaching her subjects as a would-be detective, she unravels “the mystery of how a life was lived, and why that life, although it has run its course, matters vitally to us all,” she said of her work in a Times Insider article in April 2014. If all has gone well, she said, “we have also arrived at the solution to the mystery, for in the course of the day we have learned not only how our subjects got from A to B to C in their lives — and how much of that progress was a product of free will and how much a result of pure blind fate — but also how, and why, they embodied the age in which they lived.”
This e-single, compiled from the Times archives, features a selection of Ms. Fox’s obituaries. Some highlights include: Jack A. Kinzler, NASA’s Mr. Fix-It who saved the errant space station Skylab with a parasol; Maxine Powell, the Miss Manners of Motown; McCandlish Phillips, the former Times reporter who exposed a Klansman’s Jewish background; Maurice Sendak, the author of the iconic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are”; Irving Cohen, the “King Cupid of the Catskills”; and Ruth M. Siems, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing.
