Dead Authors

"As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me."
-Stephen King, from On Writing

SK's observation above is pretty morbid, but I guess I can relate. It's hard not to think about the age of established fiction writers. I made a list, not to keep obituary-watch, but to see what kind of priority I should grant to various authors. I've read a good bit of this list, but there are a few I'd like to get to while they are still living. I'm not sure why. Maybe the connection is stronger, or maybe I just don't want to join the post-mortem rush to pick up a recently-deceased author's book. Awhile back I had to decide who to read first: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Norman Mailer. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, Mailer in 1923. So I read A.S. before N.M. But this is far from an exact science: Solzhenitsyn outlived Mailer by around 8 months. Here is a list of old people and the years of their birth. Hit me up with comments if you can think of others that should be mentioned.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918) X 8/3/2008
Doris Lessing (1919)
J.D. Salinger (1919)
Kurt Vonnegut (1922) X 4/11/2007
Norman Mailer (1923) X 11/10/2007
William Gass (1924)
Günter Grass (1927)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928)
Chinua Achebe (1930)
John Barth (1930)
Alice Munro (1931)
E.L. Doctorow (1931)
Tom Wolfe (1931)
Toni Morrison (1931)
Robert Coover (1932)
John Updike (1932) X 1/27/2009
V.S. Naipaul (1932)
Cormac McCarthy (1933)
Philip Roth (1933)
Joan Didion (1934)
Annie Proulx (1935)
Don DeLillo (1936)
Hunter S. Thompson (1937) X 2/20/2005
Thomas Pynchon (1937)