Author, Celebrity Deaths | featured news

Best-selling author James Herbert who wrote the horror classic The Rats, dies aged 69.

The man who wrote "Drugstore Cowboy," an autobiographical crime novel that led to an acclaimed 1989 film starring Matt Dillon, has died at age 75.

Helen Gurley Brown, who fed the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” and then turned around the failing Cosmopolitan magazine by injecting her philosophy that women could have it all -- “love, sex and money” -- has died. She was 90.

Gore Vidal, the author, playwright, politician and commentator whose novels, essays, plays and opinions were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, his nephew said Tuesday.

Stephen R. Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" as well as three other books that have all sold more than a million copies, has died. He was 79. In a statement sent to employees of a Utah consulting firm Covey co-founded, his family said the writer and motivational speaker died at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho, early Monday due to complications from a bicycle accident in April.

Ray Bradbury, a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Maurice Sendak, the children's book author and illustrator who saw the sometimes-dark side of childhood in books like "Where the Wild Things Are" and "In the Night Kitchen," died early Tuesday. He was 83. Longtime friend and caretaker Lynn Caponera said she was with him when Sendak died at a hospital in Danbury, Conn. She said he had a stroke on Friday.

Best-selling author Jeffrey Zaslow was killed Friday when he lost control of his car on a snowy road after promoting his latest book in Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula. He was 53.

Anne McCaffrey, whose vision of an interstellar alliance between humans and dragons spawned two dozen "Dragonriders of Pern" novels, has died in Ireland aged 85, her publisher and family announced Wednesday....

Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan six decades ago and exposed its secrets to authorities and the public but was also criticized for possibly exaggerating his exploits, died Saturday. He was 94. Kennedy died at Baptist Medical Center South near St. Augustine, where he had been receiving hospice care.