RIP

[Kobi]

Stephanie L. Kwolek, a DuPont chemist who invented the technology behind Kevlar, a virtually bulletproof fiber that has saved thousands of lives, died on Wednesday in Wilmington, Del. She was 90.

The research that led to Kevlar began in the early 1960s, when women were a rarity in industrial chemistry. Ms. Kwolek was part of a team at DuPont’s research laboratory in Wilmington that was trying to develop a lightweight fiber that would be strong enough to replace the steel used in radial tires.

Kevlar is probably best known for use in body armor, particularly bulletproof vests. A DuPont spokeswoman estimated that since the 1970s, 3,000 police officers have been saved from bullet wounds through the use of equipment reinforced with Kevlar, which is far stronger and lighter than steel.

The product has found its way into all corners of the modern world. It has been used in car tires, boots for firefighters, hockey sticks, cut-resistant gloves, fiber-optic cables, fire-resistant mattresses, armored limousines and even canoes. It is used in building materials, making them bomb-resistant. Safe rooms have been built with Kevlar to protect a building’s occupants during hurricanes. Kevlar has been used to reinforce overtaxed bridges.

Ms. Kwolek was the recipient of many honors, including the Lemelson-M.I.T. Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes the nation’s most talented inventors and innovators. In 1995, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in North Canton, Ohio. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

She was also inducted, in 2004, into the Plastics Hall of Fame at the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, Mass. There, her plaque hangs alongside those of innovators like Earl Tupper, the creator of Tupperware.

After retirement, Ms. Kwolek tutored high school students in chemistry, paying particular attention to grooming young women for work in the sciences.

Her achievements have become familiar to an even younger generation as well. In 2013, her story, told in 48 pages, became one in a series of children’s books about inventors and innovative ideas. The book, by Edwin Brit Wyckoff, is titled “The Woman Who Invented the Thread That Stops the Bullets: The Genius of Stephanie Kwolek.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/bu...t-90.html?_r=0

[Kobi]

Eli Wallach, a gravelly voiced character actor who appeared alongside such giants as Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part III, died Tuesday. He was 98.

The son of Polish Jews, Mr. Wallach was in constant demand to play nearly every kind of ethnic character on stage and screen in a career that spanned seven decades. He initially burst to prominence on Broadway, where he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of a prideful and buffoonish Sicilian named Mangiacavallo in Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo” (1951).

Mr. Wallach became one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood, with more than 150 credits in films and on television. He portrayed a Cambodian warlord in “Lord Jim” (1965), based on a Joseph Conrad novel; the Shah of Khwarezm opposite Omar Sharif in the title role of “Genghis Khan” (1965); and a candy-loving mobster in “The Godfather: Part III” (1990).

Reviewers singled out Mr. Wallach for praise as a villain in “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), a high-profile Hollywood remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” that featured Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson.

Mr. Wallach also had a pivotal role in Italian director Sergio Leone’s violent “spaghetti western” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966). His character, Tuco, was the “Ugly.”

Mr. Wallach’s other movie highlights included a psychopathic hit man in Don Siegel’s “The Lineup” (1958) and a sad-eyed widower who elicits more sympathy than attraction from divorcee Marilyn Monroe in “The Misfits” (1961).

Mr. Wallach performed in more than two dozen Broadway shows since the 1940s — several opposite his wife, actress Anne Jackson. He earned a reputation as a skilled interpreter of modern playwrights, including the absurdist Eugene Ionesco (“Rhinoceros”) and the comic writer Murray Schisgal (“Luv”). He was an early member of the Actors Studio, a workshop in New York founded by director Elia Kazan, producer Cheryl Crawford and other prominent theatrical figures.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...e59_story.html

[Kobi]

Howard Baker's question sliced to the core of Watergate: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Repeated over and again in the senator's mild Tennessee drawl, those words guided Americans through the tangle of Watergate characters and charges playing daily on TV to focus squarely on Richard Nixon and his role in the cover-up.

Baker's famous question has been dusted off for potential White House scandals big and small ever since.

Baker, who later became Senate majority leader, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and one of the GOP's elder statesmen, died Thursday. He was 88.

Baker emerged as an unlikely star of the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973.

When chosen as vice chairman — and therefore leading Republican — of the Senate special committee, he was a Nixon ally who thought the allegations couldn't possibly be true. Democrats feared he would serve as the White House's "mole" in the investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters and other crimes perpetrated in service to Nixon's re-election.

"I believed that it was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing," Baker told The Associated Press in 1992. "But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked."

He said Watergate became "the greatest disillusionment" of his political career.

Baker's intense but restrained style of interrogating former White House aides played well on camera. A youthful-looking, side-burned 47-year-old, his brainy charm inspired a raft of love notes sent to his Senate office; a women's magazine proclaimed him "studly." He was mentioned frequently as presidential material.

By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, Baker was a household name with a reputation for fairness and smarts that stuck throughout a long political career.

Howard Henry Baker Jr. had a fine political pedigree — his father was a congressman from Huntsville, Tenn., and his father-in-law a prominent senator from Illinois. Over the years, his name would be knocked about for big Washington jobs including vice presidential candidate, Supreme Court justice and CIA director. But his focus remained on the Senate and, at times, the White House.

In 18 years as a moderate Republican senator, he was known for plain speaking and plain dealing. He had a talent for brokering compromise, leading some to dub him "the Great Conciliator."

Baker was minority leader when the Reagan landslide swept Republicans into control of the chamber in 1980 Reagan, and he became the first Republican majority leader in decades.

Putting aside his own reservations about Reagan's economic proposals, Baker played a key role in passage of legislation synonymous with the "Reagan Revolution" — major tax and spending cuts combined with a military buildup.

Baker considered his years as Senate majority leader, 1981 to 1985, the high point of his career. He called it "the second-best job in town, only second to the presidency."

He made a fleeting bid for that best job in 1980, and left the Senate with an eye to another presidential run in 1988. Instead, he ended up in the White House as Reagan's chief of staff.

Reagan needed him to put things in order after ousting chief of staff Donald Regan amid scandal over the administration's secret moves to trade arms for hostages in Iran and divert the profits to Nicaraguan rebels — another of history's what-did-the-president-know moments.

The Reagan White House weathered Iran-Contra. But Baker lost his last chance at the presidency.

President George H.W. Bush sent Baker to Moscow in 1991 to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before a summit; George W. Bush named him ambassador to Japan in 2001.

An accomplished amateur photographer, Baker carried a camera wherever he went. But he didn't take any photos during the Watergate hearings.

"I felt that it was beneath the dignity of the event," he said years later. "It turned out the event had no dignity and I should have taken pictures."

http://news.yahoo.com/sen-baker-quer...-politics.html

[Kobi]

Meshach Taylor, who played a lovable ex-convict surrounded by boisterous Southern belles on the sitcom "Designing Women" and appeared in numerous other TV and film roles, died of cancer at age 67, his agent said Sunday.

Taylor got an Emmy nod for his portrayal of Anthony Bouvier on "Designing Women" from 1986 to 1993. Then he costarred for four seasons on another successful comedy, "Dave's World," as the best friend of a newspaper humor columnist played by the series' star, Harry Anderson.

Other series included the cult favorite "Buffalo Bill" and the popular Nickelodeon comedy "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide."

Taylor's movie roles included a flamboyant window dresser in the 1987 comedy-romance "Mannequin" as well as "Damien: Omen II."

He guested on many series including "Hannah Montana," ''The Unit," ''Hill Street Blues," ''Barney Miller," ''Lou Grant," ''The Drew Carey Show," and, in an episode that aired in January, "Criminal Minds," which stars Joe Montegna, with whom Taylor performed early in his career as a fellow member of Chicago's Organic Theater Company. Taylor also had been a member of that city's Goodman Theatre.

The Boston-born Taylor started acting in community shows in New Orleans, where his father was dean of students at Dillard University. He continued doing roles in Indianapolis after his father moved to Indiana University as dean of the college of arts and sciences.

After college, Taylor got a job at an Indianapolis radio station, where he rose from a "flunky job" to Statehouse reporter, he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 1989.

"It was interesting for a while," he said. "But once you get involved in Indiana politics you see what a yawn it is."

Resuming his acting pursuit, he set up a black arts theater to keep kids off the street, then joined the national touring company of "Hair." His acting career was launched.

After "Hair," he became a part of the burgeoning theater world in Chicago, where he stayed until 1979 before heading for Los Angeles.

Taylor played the assistant director in "Buffalo Bill," the short-lived NBC sitcom about an arrogant and self-centered talk show host played by Dabney Coleman. It lasted just one season, 1983-84, disappointing its small but fervent following.

Seemingly his gig on "Designing Women" could have been even more short-lived. It was initially a one-shot.

"It was for the Thanksgiving show, about halfway through the first season," Taylor said. But producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason told him if the character clicked with audiences he could stay.

It did. He spun comic gold with co-stars Jean Smart, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts and Delta Burke, and never left.

- See more at: http://www.legacy.com/ns/obituary.as....C5Dg1N6g.dpuf

[Kelt]

Charlie Haden

Charlie Haden, one of the most influential bass players of his generation, has died after a prolonged illness, according to his family and his record label, ECM.

Full article

[CherylNYC]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/ar...ies-at-84.html

Lorin Maazel, an Intense and Enigmatic Conductor, Dies at 84
By ALLAN KOZINNJULY 13, 2014
Photo

Lorin Maazel conducted the New York Philharmonic in 2011.
Lorin Maazel, a former child prodigy who went on to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and several other ensembles and companies around the world, and who was known for his incisive and sometimes extreme interpretations, died on Sunday at his home in Castleton, Va. He was 84.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jenny Lawhorn, a spokeswoman for Mr. Maazel. In recent days, he had been rehearsing for the Castleton Festival, which takes place on his farm.

Mr. Maazel (pronounced mah-ZELL) was a study in contradictions, and he evoked strong feelings, favorable and otherwise, from musicians, administrators, critics and audiences.

He projected an image of an analytical intellectual — he had studied mathematics and philosophy in college, was fluent in six languages (French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, as well as English) and kept up with many subjects outside music — and his performances could seem coolly fastidious and emotionally distant. Yet such performances were regularly offset by others that were fiery and intensely personalized.


He was revered for the precision of his baton technique, and for his prodigious memory — he rarely used a score in performances — but when he was at his most interpretively idiosyncratic, he used his powers to distend phrases and reconfigure familiar balances in the service of an unusual inner vision.

“He is clearly a brilliant man,” John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1979, “perhaps too brilliant to rest content with endless re-creations of the standard repertory. He is also, it would seem, a coldly defensive man, and perhaps that coldness coats his work with a layer of ice.

“The only trouble with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t take all the facts into account. Mr. Maazel, when he’s ‘on,’ has led some of the finest, most impassioned, most insightful performances in memory. When he’s good, he’s so good that he simply has to be counted among the great conductors of the day. Yet, enigmatically, it’s extremely difficult to predict just when he is going to be good or in what repertory.”

A Boy With a Baton

Perhaps because he grew up in the limelight, conducting orchestras from the age of 9, Mr. Maazel was self-assured, headstrong, and sometimes arrogant: When he took a new directorship, he often announced what he planned to change and why his approach was superior to what had come before. He knew what he wanted and how to get it, and if he encountered an immovable obstacle, he would walk away, also with a public explanation.

That was how he handled his brief term as general manager and artistic director at the Vienna State Opera, where he was the first American to wield such power.

“I am keen that this house again be led in the fashion of Mahler and Strauss,” he said at a news conference when his appointment was announced. “I have the full responsibility for the opera, and I have no intention of sharing that responsibility, though I may delegate it.” He added, “I will not hesitate to make changes, if I consider them necessary.”


He quickly transformed the house from a repertory company, where a different work was staged every night, to what he called a “block” system, in which groups of operas were played, with frequent repeats. He regarded this as more efficient and likely to produce better performances.

When the Viennese culture minister differed, and also complained about Mr. Maazel’s casting choices and argued that he was mainly interested in burnishing his own artistic profile, Mr. Maazel abruptly resigned, two years into a four-year term, and wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, deploring interference in the arts by government officials with no artistic background. (In September 2013, the company erected a bust of Mr. Maazel, by the sculptor Helmut Millionig. Mr. Maazel attended the unveiling ceremony.)

His tenures with the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic had their rough moments, too. The Cleveland musicians voted against hiring him to succeed the legendary George Szell, who had died in 1970, because they did not consider him sufficiently accomplished to fill Szell’s shoes. Mr. Maazel told The Times in 2002 that “the relationship remained more or less rocky to the end.”

In New York, Mr. Maazel quickly won over the Philharmonic musicians. But several critics, while happy that the orchestra had engaged an American music director for the first time since Leonard Bernstein gave up its podium in 1969, were disappointed that Mr. Maazel, 70 at the time, was of the same generation as his predecessor, Kurt Masur (then 73), and that his tastes in contemporary music seemed conservative. Eventually, many of them came to admire him.

Alan Gilbert, Mr. Maazel’s successor as music director of the Philharmonic, said Sunday, “Personally, I am grateful to him, not only for the brilliant state of the orchestra that I inherited from him, but for the support and encouragement he extended to me when I took over his responsibilities.”

Lorin Varencove Maazel was born in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on March 6, 1930, to a pair of American music students — Lincoln Maazel, a singer, and Marie Varencove Maazel, a pianist — who were studying there. He showed an aptitude for music early: When he was 5, by which time the family had moved to Los Angeles, he began studying the piano; at 7, he took up the violin.

One piece in his piano repertory was a reduction of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, and when he was 8, his father gave him a copy of the full orchestral score. Lorin studied it, along with a recording his father also bought him, and when he conducted a family ensemble in the work, his parents noted that he was adept at cues and balances. They took him to study with Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, then an associate conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

When Mr. Bakaleinikoff took a conducting job in Pittsburgh, the Maazels followed. They also sent young Lorin to music camp at Interlochen, Mich.

Olin Downes, a music critic for The Times, happened to be visiting the camp when Lorin, then 9, led the camp’s orchestra in a movement from Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. Mr. Downes, though generally skeptical of prodigies, wrote that the boy conducted “with a beat clean and firm, yet elastic and with a consistency of tempo that very occasionally was modified by a nuance absolutely in place and appropriate as it was employed.”


Toscanini and Lollipops

That summer, the Interlochen orchestra performed at the World’s Fair in New York, and Lorin conducted it twice. In 1940, just before his 10th birthday, he conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony as well, and when he was 11, in July 1941, Arturo Toscanini invited him to conduct the NBC Symphony in a concert — works by Wagner, Mendelssohn and Dika Newlin — broadcast nationally from Radio City Music Hall. The orchestra, outraged at the idea of being led by a child, greeted him at the first rehearsal with lollipops in their mouths. He won their respect the first time he stopped the rehearsal to point out a wrong note.

In the summer of 1942, and again in 1944, he led the New York Philharmonic in performances at Lewisohn Stadium. But when he turned 15, he put his baton aside and settled into his academic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

He did not abandon music entirely. In 1946, he organized the Fine Arts Quartet of Pittsburgh, with which he was a violinist until 1950, and in 1948, he joined the violin section of the Pittsburgh Symphony. An invitation from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in the summer of 1951 brought him back to the podium just before he headed off to Rome, on a Fulbright fellowship, to study Renaissance Italian music.

Mr. Maazel dated the start of his mature career to Christmas Eve 1953, when, still a student in Rome, he was invited to step in for an ailing conductor at the Teatro Bellini, in Catania. His success there led to engagements in Naples, Florence and elsewhere in Europe, and then in Japan, Australia and Latin America.


Lorin Maazel led the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2009. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
By 1960, he had conducted about 300 concerts with more than 20 European orchestras, and was sufficiently well regarded to win an invitation to conduct “Lohengrin” at Bayreuth, the German shrine that Wagner built to himself and his music. At 30, he was the youngest conductor, as well as the first American, to work there.

He was, however, virtually unknown (as an adult) in the United States. But in October 1962, he toured the country with the Orchestre Nationale de France, a Parisian radio orchestra with which he would enjoy a long relationship (he was music director from 1977 to 1991), and appeared as a guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic and at the Metropolitan Opera, where he led “Don Giovanni” and “Der Rosenkavalier.”

By the mid-1960s, he was also making recordings for two of Europe’s most prestigious labels, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic. He eventually recorded for other labels as well, among them RCA Red Seal, CBS (later Sony Classical) and Erato.

Among the highlights of his discography are recordings he made for the film versions of “Don Giovanni” (directed by Joseph Losey) and “Carmen” (Francesco Rossi), as well as his cycles of the Beethoven, Mahler and Sibelius symphonies.

An Old-Fashioned Approach

Mr. Maazel’s first music directorship was that of the Deutsche Opera, in West Berlin, jointly with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, a position he held from 1965 until 1971, when he accepted the directorship of the Cleveland Orchestra, to begin in 1972.


In Cleveland, as in Berlin, Mr. Maazel took an old-fashioned approach to the job. Instead of conducting barely more than a dozen weeks of concerts and leaving the rest to guests, as was becoming the norm, Mr. Maazel spent most of his year in Cleveland. He recorded plentifully with the orchestra, and toured with it frequently. He gave up the directorship, becoming conductor emeritus, in 1982, the year he became general manager of the Vienna State Opera.

When the Vienna directorship went sour, in 1984, Mr. Maazel declared himself liberated, free to return to the far-flung guest conducting of his early years.

“I worked as a music administrator as well as a conductor of 20 years,” he told an interviewer in 1985, “and during that time, I devoted almost all my attention to the organizations I was working for — six years in Berlin, 10 in Cleveland, three in Vienna. I’ve conducted 132 orchestras, but in the last 20 years, I’ve not conducted more than seven or eight of them. So I’m having a lot of fun going around the world now, meeting people who’ve gotten to know me through records and television. I’m like a child let out of school.”

He could not, however, resist the siren song of another directorship. In 1984, he agreed to become a music consultant to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. A year later, the orchestra upgraded his title to music adviser and principal guest conductor, and in 1988, he became its music director. By the time he relinquished the post, in 1996, he had upgraded its performance standards, taken it around the world, and won a Grammy with the orchestra for a recording of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev works with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Even so, he maintained his freelance career, and was given to occasional spectacles, like the 1988 marathon in London, when he conducted all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single 10-and-a-half-hour concert. He repeated the feat in Tokyo at the end of 2010.

In 1989, he was on a short list of candidates to succeed Herbert von Karajan at the Berlin Philharmonic. When Claudio Abbado was chosen instead, Mr. Maazel insisted that he never had any intention of leaving his Pittsburgh orchestra, and canceled his Berlin dates — not, he said, in a fit of pique, but so that Mr. Abbado would have more time to whip the orchestra into shape.

He took over the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in 1991, at a salary reported to be around $3.8 million, at that point the highest paid to any conductor anywhere, and held its directorship until 2002, when he took over the New York Philharmonic.

(He gave the Philharmonic a price break: When he left that position, in 2009, his salary was reported as $3.3 million.)

In the 1990s, Mr. Maazel revived an interest in composing that had gripped him briefly in his youth, and which he explored rarely as an adult, apart from performing a short waltz in Cleveland in 1980, and his 70-minute orchestra-only reduction of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

He took up a series of concerto commissions, writing “Music for Violoncello and Orchestra” for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1994; “Music for Flute and Orchestra” for James Galway, in 1995; and “Music for Violin and Orchestra,” in which he was the violin soloist, in 1997. He also set to work on an opera, “1984,” based on the Orwell book, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan. It had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2005, and was revived at La Scala, in Milan, in 2008.


Mr. Maazel celebrated his 70th birthday with a world tour in which he revisited many of the orchestras he had conducted over the decades. One stop was at the New York Philharmonic, which was negotiating with several conductors to succeed Mr. Masur as music director. Mr. Maazel threw his hat in the ring, and within a few weeks, he captured the post.

Among his accomplishments at the Philharmonic were the premieres of several major works, including John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls” and scores by Poul Ruders, Melinda Wagner and Aaron Jay Kernis, and taking the orchestra to Pyongyang, North Korea.

When the plan to visit Pyongyang drew protests from those who objected to his performing for a brutal regime, Mr. Maazel wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the visit was about “bringing peoples and their cultures together on common ground, where the roots of peaceful interchange can imperceptibly but irrevocably take hold.”

After he left the Philharmonic in 2009, Mr. Maazel set up the Castleton Festival, for classical music and opera, on the grounds of his farm in Virginia. He founded and directed the festival jointly with his wife, the German actress Dietlinde Turban Maazel, whom he married in 1986. Two previous marriages — to the composer Mimi Sandbank and the pianist Israela Margalit — ended in divorce.

His wife survives him, as do their two sons, Leslie and Orson Maazel, and daughter, Tara Maazel; and three daughters — Anjali Maazel, Daria Steketee and Fiona Maazel — and a son, Ilann Margalit Maazel, from his previous marriages.

Mr. Maazel’s life as a festival director did not diminish his wanderlust. He became music director of the Munich Philharmonic in 2010. And in a blog on his website, he noted that in 2013 — he was 83 — he conducted 102 concerts, performing 72 compositions in 28 cities in 16 countries. He added that he was looking forward to getting back in harness.

“Curiously, for someone who has a fairly good reputation for stick technique,” he told a reporter for The Times in 2002, “I don’t recognize stick technique per se. I don’t think I ever make the same motion twice in the same bar of music. The aim is to find a motion that responds to the need of a particular player at a particular moment. The player must be put at ease, so that he knows where he is and what is expected, and is free to concentrate on beauty of tone. There is no magic involved.”

[Kobi]

JOHANNESBURG (AP) - Nadine Gordimer was first a writer of fiction and a defender of creativity and expression. But as a white South African who hated apartheid's dehumanization of blacks, she was also a determined political activist in the struggle to end white minority rule in her country.

Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 for novels that explored the complex relationships and human cost of racial conflict in apartheid-era South Africa, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday. She was 90 years old.

The author wrote 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works, and was published in 40 languages around the world, according to the family.

"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realize its new democracy," the family said. Her "proudest days" included winning the Nobel prize and testifying in the 1980s on behalf of a group of anti-apartheid activists who had been accused of treason, they said.

Per Wastberg, an author and member of the Nobel Prize-awarding Swedish Academy, said Gordimer's descriptions of the different faces of racism told the world about South Africa during apartheid.

"She concentrated on individuals, she portrayed humans of all kinds," said Wastberg, a close friend. "Many South African authors and artists went into exile, but she felt she had to be a witness to what was going on and also lend her voice to the black, silenced authors."

"Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity," South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, said in a statement.

During apartheid, Gordimer praised Nelson Mandela, the prisoner who later became president, and accepted the decision of the main anti-apartheid movement to use violence against South Africa's white-led government.

"Having lived here for 65 years," she said, "I am well aware for how long black people refrained from violence. We white people are responsible for it."

Gordimer grew up in Springs town, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Britain and Lithuania. She began writing at age 9, and kept writing well into her 80s.

She said her first "adult story," published in a literary magazine when she was 15, grew out of her reaction as a young child to watching the casual humiliation of blacks. She recalled blacks being barred from touching clothes before buying in shops in her hometown, and police searching the maid's quarters at the Gordimer home for alcohol, which blacks were not allowed to possess.

That "began to make me think about the way we lived, and why we lived like that, and who were we," she said in a 2006 interview for the Nobel organization.

In the same interview, she bristled at the suggestion that confronting the human cost of apartheid made her a writer.

"If you're going to be a writer, you can make the death of canary important," said Gordimer, a small and elegant figure. "You can connect it to the whole chain of life, and the mystery of life. To me, what is the purpose of life? It is really to explain the mystery of life."

She said she resisted autobiography, asserting that journalistic research played no part in her creative process.

"Telling Times," a 2010 collection of her nonfiction writing dating to 1950, offers some glimpses of her own experience. She wrote in a 1963 essay of a meeting with a poet giving her an idea of a life beyond her small home town and her then aimless existence.

Gordimer's first novel, "The Lying Days," appeared in 1953, and she acknowledged that it had autobiographical elements. A New York Times reviewer compared it to Alan Paton's "Cry the Beloved Country," saying Gordimer's work "is the longer, the richer, intellectually the more exciting."

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for "The Conservationist," a novel about a white South African who loses everything.

Among Gordimer's best-known novels is "Burger's Daughter," which appeared in 1979, three years after the Soweto student uprising brought the brutality of apartheid to the world's attention.

Some readers believe the family at its center is that of Bram Fischer, a lawyer who broke with his conservative Afrikaner roots to embrace socialism and fight apartheid. The story is salted with real events and names - including Fischer's. The main character is a young woman on the periphery of a famous family who must come to terms with her legacy and her homeland.

Her 1987 novel, "A Sport of Nature," prophesized the end of apartheid and included a liberation leader based on Mandela.

"Gordimer writes with intense immediacy about the extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment," the Nobel committee said on awarding the literature prize in 1991.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Gordimer said that as a young artist, she agonized that she was cut off from "the world of ideas" by the isolation of apartheid. But she came to understand "that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place."

After the first all-race election in 1994, Gordimer wrote about the efforts of South Africa's new democracy to grapple with its racist legacy. She remained politically engaged, praising South Africa for the progress it had made, but expressing concern about alleged backsliding on freedom of expression.

"People died for our freedoms," Gordimer, who had had works banned by the apartheid government, told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview. "People spent years and years in prison, from the great Nelson Mandela down through many others."

- See more at: http://www.legacy.com/ns/obituary.as....XZvpU0vE.dpuf