E. Lynn Harris, 54, of Atlanta, whose novels about successful and glamorous black men with sexual identity conflicts (and the women and men who love them) made him one of America's most popular writers, died in Los Angeles on Thursday. The cause of death has not yet been determined.
Harris fell briefly ill earlier in the week on a train to Los Angeles, said Laura Gilmore, a publicist for Harris, but he had seen a doctor and everything seemed fine. She said she spoke to him by phone Thursday evening and had no inkling of a problem. He died shortly thereafter.
Harris clearly tapped a rich vein of reader interest with his racy and sometimes graphic tales of affluent, ambitious, powerful black men -- athletes, businessmen, lawyers and the like -- who nonetheless struggled with their attraction to both men and women. His books married the superficial glamour of jet-setting potboilers with an emotional candor that shed light on a segment of society that had received little attention: black men on the down low -- that is, men who are publicly heterosexual but secretly have sex with men.
Harris, who was openly gay but who lived for many years in denial or shame or both over that fact, was able to draw on his own experiences to make credible the emotional conflicts of his characters, and his readers, many of them women, were drawn to his books because they addressed issues that were often surreptitiously pertinent to their own lives.
Harry Patch, 111, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.
Patch, who died Saturday in Wells, southwest England, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."
"Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren't scared, he's a damned liar: you were scared all the time," Patch was quoted as saying in a book, "The Last Fighting Tommy," written with historian Richard van Emden.
NEW YORK TIMES, AP
