Deaths in 2017: Among the Luminaries, Fighters With a Cause
In death he joined a pride of literary lions, like the poets John Ashbery, whose voice — "by turns playful
and elegiac, absurd and exquisite," his obituary said — remained singular despite his many imitators; Richard Wilbur, the American laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner whose words, by many lights, coalesced into things of beauty; and Derek Walcott, the Nobel winner who filtered his acute observations on colonialism and culturalism through the rustling palms of his native Caribbean.
Mr. Liu was just one of a remarkable roster of disparate people who died this year having fought, as
their eulogists might say, "the good fight" — an expression that rings of cliché but also of truth.
Pillars of the theater fell: the directors Peter Hall, who towered on both sides of the Atlantic,
and Max Ferra, who championed the work of Latinos; the British actors John Hurt, Roy Dotrice and Alec McCowen; and the playwrights A. R. Gurney and Sam Shepard, though "playwright" alone does little justice to the uncontainable Mr. Shepard’s manifold artistry, which branched as well into movies, television, music and fiction.
Their names may have found their way into obituary headlines,
but they were not "headline names," as we know the term — not like those of the many luminaries who died along with them this year.
If Dr. Reed shunned a medical tool, Oliver Smithies, one of many groundbreaking scientists to die this year, created one.
