O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.” She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.

“O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in The Guardian in 2012.

A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man’s “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club.” She befriended movie stars and heads of state while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.

O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”

Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O’Brien’s ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors also included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom she was already becoming estranged.

“I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read, should he wish, and one morning he surprised me by appearing quite early in the doorway of the kitchen, the manuscript in his hand,” she wrote in her memoir “Country Girl,” published in 2012. “He had read it. Yes, he had to concede that despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of the already ailing marriage — ‘You can write and I will never forgive you.’”

___

She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss” and by the mid-1960s was single and enjoying the prime of “Swinging London”: whether socializing with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum (“I bet you never tasted white peaches,” he said upon meeting her). Another night, she was escorted home by Paul McCartney, who asked to see her children, picked up her son’s guitar and improvised a song that included the lines about O’Brien “She’ll have you sighing/ She’ll have you crying/ Hey/ She’ll blow your mind away.”

Enright would call O’Brien “the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex — the rest just had children.”

O’Brien was recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson, and she befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. While being private and immured she also had a hunger for intimacy — it was as if the barriers she had put up needed at times to be battered down.”

O’Brien related well to Kennedy’s reticence, and longing. The literary world gossiped about the author’s love life, but O’Brien’s deepest existence was on the page, from addressing a present that seemed without boundaries (“She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once,” one of her characters thinks) to sorting out a past that seemed all boundaries — “the don’ts and the don’ts and the don’ts.”

In her story “The Love Object,” the narrator confronts her lust, and love, for an adulterous family man who need only say her name to make her legs tremble. “Long Distance” arrives at the end of an affair as a man and woman struggle to recapture their feelings for each other, haunted by grudges and mistrust:

“Love, she thought, is like nature but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.”

“A Scandalous Woman” follows the stifling of a lively young Irish nonconformist — part of that “small solidarity of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers” — and ends with O’Brien’s condemning her country as a “land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.” In “My Two Mothers,” the narrator prays for the chance to “begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame.”

O’Brien’s other books included the erotic novel “August Is a Wicked Month,” which drew upon her time with Mitchum and was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about a teenage Irish girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father; and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her ailing mother. “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Haram, came out in 2019.

O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or even the Booker Prize. Her honors did include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners,” for which she was praised by poet and award judge Thomas McCarthy as “the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irish woman.”

___

Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, possibly out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on her daughter’s imagination, the force of her regrets, made her a lifelong muse and a near stand-in for Ireland itself, “the cupboard with all things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it.”

Like Kate and Baba in “The Country Girls,” O’Brien was educated in part at a convent, “dour years” made feverish by a disorienting crush she developed on one of the nuns. Language, too, was a temptation, and signpost, like the words she came upon on the back of her prayer book: “Lord, rebuke me not in thy wraith, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.”

“What did it mean?” she remembered thinking. “It didn’t matter what it meant. It would carry me through lessons and theorems and soggy meat and cabbage, because now, in secret, I had been drawn into the wild heart of things.”

By her early 20s, she was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy and Thackeray, among others, in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since she sneaked out to nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a Joyce anthology and learned that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that ran in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing house Hutchinson, where editors were impressed enough by her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.”

Willie Mays, the electrifying “Say Hey Kid” whose singular combination of talent, drive and exuberance made him one of baseball’s greatest and most beloved players, has died. He was 93.

Mays’ family and the San Francisco Giants jointly announced Tuesday night he had died earlier in the afternoon in the Bay Area.

“My father has passed away peacefully and among loved ones,” son Michael Mays said in a statement released by the club. “I want to thank you all from the bottom of my broken heart for the unwavering love you have shown him over the years. You have been his life’s blood.”

The center fielder, who began his professional career in the Negro Leagues in 1948, had been baseball’s oldest living Hall of Famer. He was voted into the Hall in 1979, his first year of eligibility, and in 1999 followed only Babe Ruth on The Sporting News’ list of the game’s top stars. The Giants retired his uniform number, 24, and set their AT&T Park in San Francisco on Willie Mays Plaza.

Mays died two days before a game between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals to honor the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama.

“All of Major League Baseball is in mourning today as we are gathered at the very ballpark where a career and a legacy like no other began,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “Willie Mays took his all-around brilliance from the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League to the historic Giants franchise. From coast to coast … Willie inspired generations of players and fans as the game grew and truly earned its place as our National Pastime.”

Few were so blessed with each of the five essential qualities for a superstar — hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, fielding and throwing. Fewer so joyously exerted those qualities — whether launching home runs; dashing around the bases, loose-fitting cap flying off his head; or chasing down fly balls in center field and finishing the job with his trademark basket catch.

Over 23 major league seasons, virtually all with the New York/San Francisco Giants but also including one in the Negro Leagues, Mays batted .301, hit 660 home runs, totaled 3,293 hits, scored more than 2,000 runs and won 12 Gold Gloves. He was Rookie of the Year in 1951, twice was named the Most Valuable Player and finished in the top 10 for the MVP 10 other times. His lightning sprint and over-the-shoulder grab of an apparent extra base hit in the 1954 World Series remains the most celebrated defensive play in baseball history.

“When I played ball, I tried to make sure everybody enjoyed what I was doing,” Mays told NPR in 2010. “I made the clubhouse guy fit me a cap that when I ran, the wind gets up in the bottom and it flies right off. People love that kind of stuff.”

For millions in the 1950s and ’60s and after, the smiling ballplayer with the friendly, high-pitched voice was a signature athlete and showman during an era when baseball was still the signature pastime. Awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015, Mays left his fans with countless memories. But a single feat served to capture his magic — one so untoppable it was simply called “The Catch.”

In Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, the then-New York Giants hosted the Cleveland Indians, who had won 111 games in the regular season and were strong favorites in the postseason. The score was 2-2 in the top of the eighth inning. Cleveland’s Vic Wertz faced reliever Don Liddle with none out, Larry Doby on second and Al Rosen on first.

With the count 1-2, Wertz smashed a fastball to deep center field. In an average park, with an average center fielder, Wertz would have homered, or at least had an easy triple. But the center field wall in the eccentrically shaped Polo Grounds was more than 450 feet away. And there was nothing close to average about the skills of Willie Mays.

Decades of taped replays have not diminished the astonishment of watching Mays race toward the wall, his back to home plate, reach out his glove and haul in the drive. What followed was also extraordinary: Mays managed to turn around while still moving forward, heave the ball to the infield and prevent Doby from scoring even as Mays spun to the ground. Mays himself would proudly point out that “the throw” was as important as “the catch.”

“Soon as it got hit, I knew I’d catch the ball,” Mays told biographer James S. Hirsch, whose book came out in 2010.

“All the time I’m running back, I’m thinking, ‘Willie, you’ve got to get this ball back to the infield.’”

“The Catch” was seen and heard by millions through radio and the then-emerging medium of television, and Mays became one of the first Black athletes with mass media appeal. He was a guest star on “The Donna Reed Show,” “Bewitched” and other sitcoms. He inspired a handful of songs and was named first in Terry Cashman’s 1980s novelty hit, “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey & The Duke),” a tribute in part to the brief era when New York had three future Hall of Famers in center: Mays, Mantle of the Yankees and Snider of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Giants went on to sweep the Indians, with many citing Mays’ play as the turning point. The impact was so powerful that 63 years later, in 2017, baseball named the World Series Most Valuable Player after him even though it was his only moment of postseason greatness. He appeared in three other World Series, in 1951 and 1962 for the Giants and 1973 for the Mets, batting just .239 with no home runs in the four series. (His one postseason homer was in the 1971 National League playoffs, when the Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates).

But “The Catch” and his achievements during the regular season were greatness enough. Yankees and Dodgers fans may have fiercely challenged Mays’ eminence, but Mantle and Snider did not. At a 1995 baseball writers dinner in Manhattan, with all three at the dais, Mantle raised the eternal question: Which of the three was better?

“We don’t mind being second, do we, Duke?” he added.

Between 1954 and 1966, Mays drove in 100 or more runs 10 times, scored 100 or more 12 times, hit 40 or more homers six times, more than 50 homers twice and led the league in stolen bases four times. His numbers might have been bigger. He missed most of 1952 and all of 1953 because of military service, quite possibly costing him the chance to overtake Ruth’s career home run record of 714, an honor that first went to Henry Aaron, then Mays’ godson, Barry Bonds. He likely would have won more Gold Gloves if the award had been established before 1956. He insisted he would have led the league in steals more often had he tried.

“I am beyond devastated and overcome with emotion. I have no words to describe what you mean to me,” Bonds wrote on Instagram.

Mays was fortunate in escaping serious injury and avoiding major scandal, but he endured personal and professional troubles. His first marriage, to Margherite Wendell, ended in divorce. He was often short of money in the pre-free agent era, and he received less for endorsements than Mantle and other white athletes. He was subject to racist insults and his insistence that he was an entertainer, not a spokesman, led to his being chastised by Jackie Robinson and others for not contributing more to the civil rights movement. He didn’t care for some of his managers and didn’t always appreciate a fellow idol, notably Aaron, his greatest contemporary.

“When Henry began to soar up the home-run chart, Willie was loathe to give even a partial nod to Henry’s ability, choosing instead to blame his own performance on his home turf, (San Francisco’s) Candlestick Park, saying it was a lousy park in which to hit homers and this was the reason for Henry’s onrush,” Aaron biographer Howard Bryant wrote in 2010.

Admirers of Aaron, who died in 2021, would contend that only his quiet demeanor and geographical distance from major media centers — Aaron played in Atlanta and Milwaukee — kept him from being ranked the same as, or even better than, Mays. But much of the baseball world placed Mays above all. He was the game’s highest-paid player for 11 seasons (according to the Society for American Baseball Research) and often batted first in All-Star Games, because he was Willie Mays. From center field, he called pitches and positioned other fielders. He boasted that he relied on his own instincts, not those of any coach, when deciding whether to try for an extra base.

Sports writer Barney Kremenko has often been credited with nicknaming him “The Say Hey Kid,” referring to Mays’ spirited way of greeting his teammates. Moments on and off the field sealed the public’s affection. In 1965, Mays defused a horrifying brawl after teammate Juan Marichal clubbed Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro with a bat. Mays led a bloodied Roseboro away and sat with him on the clubhouse bench of the Dodgers, the Giants’ hated rivals.

Years earlier, when living in Manhattan, he endeared himself to young fans by playing in neighborhood stickball games.

“I used to have maybe 10 kids come to my window,” he said in 2011 while visiting the area of the old Polo Grounds. “Every morning, they’d come at 9 o’clock. They’d knock on my window, get me up. And I had to be out at 9:30. So they’d give me a chance to go shower. They’d give me a chance to eat breakfast. But I had to be out there at 9:30, because that’s when they wanted to play. So I played with them for about maybe an hour.”

He was born in Westfield, Alabama, in 1931, the son of a Negro League player who wanted Willie to do the same, playing catch with him and letting him sit in the dugout. Young Mays was so gifted an athlete that childhood friends swore that basketball, not baseball, was his best sport.

By high school he was playing for the Birmingham Black Barons, and late in life would receive an additional 10 hits to his career total, 3,293, when Negro League statistics were recognized in 2024 by Major League Baseball. With Robinson breaking the major league’s color barrier in 1947, Mays’ ascension became inevitable. The Giants signed him after he graduated from high school (he had to skip his senior prom) and sent him to their minor league affiliate in Trenton, New Jersey. He began the 1951 season with Minneapolis, a Triple-A club. After 35 games, he was batting a head-turning .477 and was labeled by one scout as “the best prospect in America.” Giants Manager Leo Durocher saw no reason to wait and demanded that Mays, barely 20 at the time, join his team’s starting lineup.

Durocher managed Mays from 1951-55 and became a father figure — the surly but astute leader who nurtured and sometimes pampered the young phenom. As Durocher liked to tell it, and Mays never disputed, Mays struggled in his first few games and was ready to go back to the minors.

“In the minors I’m hitting .477, killing everybody. And I came to the majors, I couldn’t hit. I was playing the outfield very, very well, throwing out everybody, but I just couldn’t get a hit,” Mays told the Academy of Achievement, a Washington-based leadership center, in 1996. “And I started crying, and Leo came to me and he says: ‘You’re my center fielder; it doesn’t make any difference what you do. You just go home, come back and play tomorrow.’ I think that really, really turned me around.”

Mays finished 1951 batting .272 with 20 home runs, good enough to be named the league’s top rookie. He might have been a legend that first season. The Giants were 13 games behind Brooklyn on Aug. 11 but rallied and tied the Dodgers, then won a best-of-three playoff series with one of baseball’s most storied homers: Bobby Thomson’s shot in the bottom of the ninth off Ralph Branca.

Mays was the on-deck batter.

“I was concentrating on Branca, what he was throwing, what he might throw me,” Mays told The New York Times in 2010. “When he hit the home run, I didn’t even move.

“I remember all the guys running by me, running to home plate, and I’m saying, ‘What’s going on here?’ I was thinking, ‘I got to hit!’”

His military service the next two years stalled his career but not his development. Mays was assigned as a batting instructor for his unit’s baseball team and, at the suggestion of one pupil, began catching fly balls by holding out his glove face up, around his belly, like a basket. Mays adopted the new approach in part because it enabled him to throw more quickly.

He returned full time in 1954, hitting 41 homers and a league-leading .345. He was only 34 when he hit his 500th career homer, in 1965, but managed just 160 over the next eight years. Early in the 1972 season, with Mays struggling and the Giants looking to cut costs, the team stunned Mays and others by trading its marquee player to the New York Mets, returning him to the city where he had started out in the majors.

Mays’ debut with his new team could not have been better scripted: He hit a go-ahead home run in the fifth inning against the visiting Giants, and helped the Mets win 5-4. But he deteriorated badly over the next two seasons, even falling down on occasion in the field. Many cited him as example of a star who stayed too long.

In retirement, he mentored Bonds and defended him against allegations of using steroids. Mays himself was in trouble when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned him from the game, in 1979, for doing promotional work at the Bally’s Park Place Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Kuhn’s successor, Peter Ueberroth, reinstated Mays and fellow casino promoter Mantle in 1985).

But tributes were more common and they came from everywhere — show business, sports, the White House. In the 1979 movie “Manhattan,” Woody Allen’s character cites Mays as among his reasons for living. When Obama learned he was a distant cousin of political rival and former Vice President Dick Cheney, he lamented that he wasn’t related to someone “cool” like Mays.

“Willie Mays wasn’t just a singular athlete, blessed with an unmatched combination of grace, skill and power,” Obama said Tuesday on X. “He was also a wonderfully warm and generous person — and an inspiration to an entire generation.”

Asked about career highlights, Mays inevitably mentioned “The Catch,” but also cherished hitting four home runs in a game against the Braves; falling over a canvas fence to make a catch in the minors; and running into a fence in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field while chasing a bases-loaded drive, knocking himself out, but still holding on to the ball.

Most of the time, he was happy just being on the field, especially when the sun went down.

“I mean, you had the lights out there and all you do is go out there, and you’re out there by yourself in center field,” he told the achievement academy. “And, I just felt that it was such a beautiful game that I just wanted to play it forever, you know.”

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb

NEW YORK (AP) — Albert S. Ruddy, a colorful, Canadian-born producer and writer who won Oscars for “The Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby,” developed the raucous prison-sports comedy “The Longest Yard” and helped create the hit sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” has died at age 94.

Ruddy died “peacefully” Saturday at the UCLA Medical Center, according to a spokesperson, who added that among his final words were, “The game is over, but we won the game.”

Tall and muscular, with a raspy voice and a city kid’s swagger, Ruddy produced more than 30 movies and was on hand for the very top and very bottom, from the “Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby” to “Cannonball Run II” and “Megaforce,” nominees for Golden Raspberry awards for worst movie of the year.

Otherwise, he had a mix of successes such as “The Longest Yard,” which he produced and created the story for, and such flops as the Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller “Sabotage.” He worked often with Burt Reynolds, starting with “The Longest Yard” and continuing with two “Cannonball Run” comedies and “Cloud Nine.” Besides “Hogan’s Heroes,” his television credits include the movies “Married to a Stranger” and “Running Mates.”

Nothing looks better on your resume than “The Godfather,” but producing it endangered Ruddy’s job, reputation and his very life. Frank Sinatra and other Italian Americans were infuriated by the project, which they feared would harden stereotypes of Italians as criminals, and real-life mobsters let Ruddy know he was being watched. One night he heard gunfire outside his home and the sound of his car’s windows being shot out.

On his dashboard was a warning that he should close the production, immediately.

Ruddy saved himself, and the film, through diplomacy; he met with crime boss Joseph Colombo and a couple of henchmen to discuss the script.

“Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window,” Ruddy told Vanity Fair in 2009. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it (the script) for about two minutes. What does this mean “fade in?” he asked.’”

Ruddy agreed to remove a single, gratuitous mention of the word “mafia” and to make a donation to the Italian American Civil Rights League. Colombo was so pleased that he urged Ruddy to appear with him at a press conference announcing his approval of the movie, a gathering that led to Ruddy’s being photographed alongside members of organized crime.

With the stock of parent company Gulf & Western dropping fast, Paramount fired Ruddy, only to have director Francis Coppola object and get him rehired. In the end, mobsters were cast as extras and openly consulted with cast members. Ruddy himself made a cameo as a Hollywood studio guard.

“It was like one happy family,” Ruddy told Vanity Fair. “All these guys loved the underworld characters, and obviously the underworld guys loved Hollywood.”

With a cast including Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert Duvall, “The Godfather” was a critical and commercial sensation and remains among the most beloved and quoted movies in history. When Ruddy was named winner of the best picture Oscar at the 1973 ceremony, the presenter was Clint Eastwood, with whom he would produce “Million Dollar Baby,” the best picture winner in 2005. Upon the 50th anniversary of “The Godfather,” in 2022, Ruddy himself became a character. Miles Teller played him in “The Offer,” a Paramount+ miniseries about the making of the movie, based on Ruddy’s experiences.

“Al Ruddy was absolutely beautiful to me the whole time on ‘The Godfather’; even when they didn’t want me, he wanted me,” Pacino said in a statement. “He gave me the gift of encouragement when I needed it most and I’ll never forget it.”

Ruddy was married to Wanda McDaniel, a sales executive and liaison for Giorgio Armani who helped make the brand omnipresent in Hollywood, whether in movies or at promotional events. They had two children.

Born in Montreal in 1930, Albert Stotland Ruddy moved to the U.S. as a child and was raised in New York City. After graduating from the University of Southern California, he was working as an architect when he met TV actor Bernard Fein in the early 1960s. Ruddy had tired of his career, and he and Fein decided to develop a TV series, even though neither had done any writing.

Their original idea was a comedy set in an American prison, but they soon changed their minds.

“We read in the paper that … (a) network was doing a sitcom set in an Italian prisoner of war camp and we thought, ‘Perfect,’” Ruddy later explained. “We rewrote our script and set it in a German POW camp in about two days.”

Starring Bob Crane as the wily Col. Hogan, “Hogan’s Heroes” ran from 1965-71 on CBS but was criticized for trivializing World War II and turning the Nazis into lovable cartoons. Ruddy remembered network head William Paley calling the show’s concept “reprehensible,” but softening after Ruddy “literally acted out an episode,” complete with barking dogs and other sound effects.

While Fein continued with “Hogan’s Heroes,” Ruddy turned to film, overseeing the low-budget “Wild Seed” for Brando’s production company. His reputation for managing costs proved most useful when Paramount Pictures head Robert Evans acquired rights to Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel “The Godfather” and sought a producer for what was supposed to be a minor, profit-taking gangster film.

“I got a call on a Sunday. ‘Do you want to do The Godfather?’” Ruddy told Vanity Fair. “I thought they were kidding me, right? I said, ‘Yes, of course, I love that book’ — which I had never read.”

Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92.

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised “Dear Life” to the high end of The New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”

Her best known fiction included “The Beggar’s Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family”; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any surroundings can be interesting.”

Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. “The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.”

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”

Moviegoers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by Sarah Polley into the 2006 feature film “Away from Her,” which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there’s no question the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer.”

Munro would acknowledge that she didn’t think like a novelist.

“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in Vancouver, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.

“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”

But after Missouri legislators passed a law in 2022 subjecting librarians to fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves, the suburban St. Louis district reconsidered the new Atwood edition, and withdrew it.

“There’s a depiction of a rape scene, a handmaid being forced into a sexual act,” says Tom Bober, Clayton district’s library coordinator and president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians. “It’s literally one panel of the graphic novel, but we felt it was in violation of the law in Missouri.”

Across the country, book challenges and bans have soared to the highest levels in decades. Public and school-based libraries have been inundated with complaints from community members and conservative organizations such as as Moms for Liberty. Increasingly, lawmakers are considering new punishments — crippling lawsuits, hefty fines, and even imprisonment — for distributing books some regard as inappropriate.

The trend comes as officials seek to define terms such as “obscene” and “harmful.” Many of the conflicts involve materials featuring racial and/or LGBTQ+ themes, such as Toni Morrison’s novel, “The Bluest Eye,” and Maia Kobabe’s memoir, “Gender Queer.” And while no librarian or educator has been jailed, the threat alone has led to more self-censorship.

Already this year, lawmakers in more than 15 states have introduced bills to impose harsh penalties on libraries or librarians.

Utah enacted legislation in March that empowers the state’s Attorney General to enforce a new system of challenging and removing “sensitive” books from school settings. The law also creates a panel to monitor compliance and violations.

Awaiting Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s signature is a bill that empowers local prosecutors to bring charges against public and school libraries if they don’t move “harmful” materials away from children.

“The laws are designed to limit or remove legal protections that libraries have had for decades,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Since the early 1960s, institutions including schools, libraries and museums — as well as educators, librarians and other staffers who distribute materials to children — have largely been exempt from expensive lawsuits or potential criminal charges.

These protections began showing up in states as America grappled with standards surrounding obscenity, which was defined by the Supreme Court in 1973.

Ruling 5-4 in Miller v. California, the justices said obscene materials are not automatically protected by the First Amendment, and offered three criteria that must be met for being labeled obscene: whether the work, taken as a whole, appeals to “prurient interest,” whether “the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law,” and whether the work lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Eventually, almost every state adopted protections for educators, librarians and museum officials, among others who provide information to minors.

“Until recently, police and prosecutors were unable to pursue charges against public libraries over materials that make certain individuals uncomfortable. These exemptions have prevented spurious prosecutions of teachers over health and sexuality curriculum, art, theater, and difficult subjects in English classes,” stated a 2023 report from EveryLibrary, a national political action committee that opposes censorship.

Arkansas and Indiana targeted educators and librarians with criminalization laws last year. Tennessee criminalized publishers that provide “obscene” materials to public schools.

Some Republicans are seeking penalties and restrictions that would apply nationwide. Referring to “pornography” in the foreword to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a possible second Donald Trump administration, the right-wing group’s president, Kevin Roberts, wrote that the “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

Arkansas’ version was temporarily blocked by a federal judge after a coalition of librarians and publishers challenged the legality of subjecting librarians and booksellers to criminal charges if they provide “harmful” materials to minors.

Indiana lawmakers stripped away “educational purposes” as a defense for school librarians and educators charged with giving minors “obscene” or “harmful” material — felonies punishable by up to 2½ years in jail and $10,000 in fines. The law also requires public catalogs of what’s in each school library and systems for responding to complaints.

Indiana’s law took effect January 1. It’s likely a matter of when — not if — a lawsuit is filed, and the anxiety has created a chilling effect.

“It’s putting fear into some people. It’s very scary,” said Diane Rogers, a school librarian who serves as president of the Indiana Library Federation. “If you’re a licensed teacher just being charged with a felony potentially gets rid of your license even if you’re found innocent. That’s a very serious thing.”

Rogers said she’s confident Indiana’s school libraries don’t offer obscene materials, but she’s seen reports that some districts have moved certain titles to higher age groups or required parental approval to check them out.

A PEN America list shows 300 titles were removed from school libraries across 11 Missouri districts after lawmakers in 2022 banned “sexually explicit” material, punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine. The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and library groups challenged the law last year, but it remains in effect pending a motion for the state to intervene.

“Gender Queer” is another title no longer available to high schoolers in Clayton, where district officials recently turned their attention to Mike Curato’s graphic novel, “Flamer,” about a teenager who struggles with his sexual identity and how to fit in at Boy Scout camp. The American Library Association included “Flamer” on its list of 2023’s most challenged and/or banned books.

“We had a lot of conversations about how to interpret the law and not be in violation,” Bober said. “But we also didn’t want to overreach and overcensor our collections. With ‘Flamer,’ we did not feel we were in violation of the law.”

Eggers’ “The Eyes & the Impossible,” the great adventure of a very fast dog, has received the John Newbery Medal for the year’s best children’s book, an honor previously given to Beverly Cleary, Neil Gaiman and Lois Lowry and others. Eggers is otherwise known for such acclaimed adult books as “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” “What Is the What” and “A Hologram for the King.”

The Randolph Caldecott Medal for outstanding illustration was given to Vashti Harrison’s “Big,” the first time the award was given to a Black woman since it was established in 1938. Last fall, “Big” was a National Book Award finalist.

The Newbery and Caldecott medals were among the awards announced Monday by the American Library Association.

Pedro Martín’s “Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir” won the Pura Belpré Award, given to Latinx writers, for best book and for illustration. Rebecca Yarros’ “Fourth Wing” was among 10 winners of the Alex Award for adult book that appeal to teen readers. Other Alex recipients included Darrin Bell’s “The Talk” and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “Chain Gang All Stars.”

Ibi Zoboi’s “Nigeria Jones” won the Coretta Scott King Award for outstanding work by a Black author, and Dare Colter won the King illustration award for “An American Story,” written by Kwame Alexander.

“The Collectors,” a book of short stories featuring contributions from Jason Reynolds, David Levithan and others, received the Michael L. Printz Award for young adult literature. Neal Shusterman, author of “The Arc of the Scythe,” “Bruiser,” Challenger Deep” and others, has received the Margaret Edwards Award for lifetime achievement.

Print book sales continued to recede following the pandemic-era surge, but fiction remained strong, thanks in part to the young readers on BookTok. Colleen Hoover, one of BookTok’s signature authors, continued her reign as the country’s top-selling author, even without releasing a new book in 2023. Three of her novels were among the top 10 sellers as tracked by Circana, with other popular releases including novels by two authors, Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, regarded as leaders of “romantasy,” a newly branded genre that combines romance and fantasy.

Literary highlights included Justin Torres’ inventive narrative on the hidden history of gay sexuality, “Blackouts,” winner of the National Book Award for fiction. Critics also praised James McBride’s multiethnic crime story “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” R.F. Kuang’s satirical “Yellowface,” Paul Murray’s family drama “The Bee Sting” and such nonfiction releases as Jonathan Eig’s Martin Luther King biography “King,” Naomi Klein’s Internet saga “Doppelganger” and another National Book Award winner, Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.”

Book news was shaped otherwise by courtrooms, boardrooms, palace gossip, technological advances and growing divides in the U.S. and abroad.

The year was bracketed by million-selling tell-alls from celebrities estranged from their families: Prince Harry’s “Spare” and Britney Spears’ “The Woman in Me.” Both were stories of confinement and repression, from the palace life that Harry feared might drive his wife — Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — to take her own life, to the conservatorship that gave Spears’ father power over everything from her finances to her ability to have children. Harry framed his life as a kind of reckoning, opening the book with William Faulkner’s famed observation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Spears looked back hopefully to a youthful promise she made to herself: “I can make my own way to life. I can make my dreams come true.”

ChatGPT is not yet a major force in the book market, but real-life writers are worried enough to take legal steps to prevent it, or at least control it. Numerous lawsuits were filed in 2023, including a class-action lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild. George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, among other authors. The plaintiffs allege ChatGPT is a “massive commercial enterprise” reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The Associated Press that she thinks the industry is on the verge of an “explosion” of AI-generated books that could well cut into the earnings of authors, most of whom already make little from their work.

“We have to get some money back into the system,” says Rasenberger, who has advocated that authors receive compensation for copyrighted books used in AI programs.

Simon & Schuster, the home to Stephen King, Hillary Clinton and many others, and which turns 100 in 2024, serves as a kind of parable of a corporate-owned publisher unable to control its own destiny.

Sold in 1975 to Gulf & Western, Simon & Schuster has since been part of various leadership structures, most recently Paramount Global. The company had solid growth in 2023, but once Paramount decided it was “a non-core asset,” its future was a matter of market calculations and antitrust law. After a federal judge halted Penguin Random House’s acquisition of its longtime rival, citing the likely shrinkage of competition, Paramount sold Simon & Schuster to the private equity firm KKR.

Paramount’s farewell statement had all the poetry of a quarterly balance sheet: “Simon & Schuster is positioned well for future growth, and the transaction itself demonstrates significant value capture for Paramount and meaningfully advances our de-levering plan.”

The publishing industry’s push to offer more diverse books continued to clash with a surge in bannings and attempted bannings that the American Library Association reports has reached levels not seen in decades, with Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” among those removed from shelves. Near the end of 2023, Green was among the authors signed on to a Penguin Random House lawsuit over Iowa’s restrictions on sexual content and depictions of gender identity.

Even attempted middle ground proved unstable. When Scholastic isolated some diverse books into a separate package that communities could preemptively reject for school fairs, authors were enraged and the children’s publisher apologized. It has since announced a new strategy that incorporates diverse books into the overall catalog while letting schools “make their own local merchandising decisions, as they have always done, just like any bookstore or library.”

Author Salman Rushdie, hospitalized after a horrifying knife attack in August 2022, reemerged publicly, although under increased security. He was honored in person during PEN America’s annual spring gala in Manhattan, received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade during October’s Frankfurt Book Fair and was awarded the first-ever lifetime Disturbing the Peace prize in November at Manhattan’s Vaclav Havel Center. His publishing return comes soon: He’s writing a book about the attack, “Knife,” scheduled for April.

The Hollywood strikes didn’t only upend the film and television industries. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, whose company was a key player in the writers strike, decided against attending the PEN America ceremony, where he was to receive a Business Visionary Award. Drew Barrymore was dropped as host of the National Book Awards after she started taping her talk show while its writers were still on strike. Her replacement was the actor and literacy advocate LeVar Burton.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza divided the literary community in ways that mirrored other public debates.

The Russian author-activist Masha Gessen resigned as vice president of the PEN board after the literary and human rights organization canceled an event that was to have featured both Russian and Ukrainian panelists. (The Ukrainians had objected to the Russians’ participation.) Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert announced she would postpone her novel “The Snow Forest” because some Ukrainians had objected to the story’s taking place in Russia. Gilbert called her decision “a course correction.”

Officials at the Frankfurt fair canceled a tribute to the Palestinian author Adania Shibli, who had been scheduled to receive a prize for female writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world. A sponsor of the National Book Awards, author-publisher-podcaster Zibby Owens, withdrew her support when she learned that some finalists would read a statement about the war. Owens feared that the authors would “collectively band together to use their speeches to promote a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli agenda,” but the actual statement condemned antisemitism, along with Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bias.

The 92nd Street Y in Manhattan dropped an event with Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed a petition opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza. With authors condemning the decision and several staffers resigning, the Y put its fall literary schedule on hold. Nguyen, meanwhile, was invited to appear instead at the independent bookstore McNally Jackson.

“I spoke about my book, yes, but also about how art is silenced in times of war and division because some people only want to see the world as us vs them,” Nguyen later wrote on Instagram. “And writing is the only way I know how to fight. And writing is the only way I know how to grieve.”

Instead, the Association of American Publishers is honoring “all publishing houses in multiple countries and regions of the world that continued to publish” this year in the face of opposition.

“This year we heard from numerous publishers from various parts of the world who were grateful to be considered for recognition, but who also live in fear of the additional scrutiny, harassment, and danger that such an honor might bring,” Terry Adams, who chairs the AAP’s Freedom to Publish Committee, said in a statement Tuesday.

“As a result, this year’s award is for the many houses who quietly fight the battle for free expression under impossibly difficult circumstances.”

The publishers association established the award in 2002, recognizing houses from outside the U.S. “who have demonstrated courage and fortitude in defending freedom of expression.” Publishers in South Africa, Guatemala and Bangladesh are among the previous winners. Last year, the AAP honored Editorial Dahbar, in Venezuela.

“I just want you to know that no matter what you do, nothing’s going to take away from everyone’s memory and appreciation of what your family has done for this country,” Republican David Dumas told him.

“He meant that ’Don’t preoccupy yourself with worrying about whether you’re a good representative of your family or not,’” Patrick Kennedy, now a former congressman, said in a recent Zoom interview.

Kennedy spoke shortly before the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, a seismic national event that predates most American lives but remains an inflection point in the country’s history — as a wellspring of modern conspiracy theories, as a debate over what JFK might have achieved, as an emotional cornerstone of the Kennedy story.

The anniversary arrives at an unusual moment for the Kennedys. It is a moment when the family’s mission to uphold a legacy of public service and high ideals competes for attention with the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose anti-vaccine advocacy and inflammatory comments about everything from the Holocaust to the pandemic have led to a rare public family breach.

Robert’s sister Kerry Kennedy has cited her differences with him “on many issues,” while Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President Kennedy, has called Robert’s candidacy “an embarrassment.”

“We haven’t seen this happening before in the Kennedy family,” says historian Thurston Clarke, author of books on President Kennedy and his brother Robert. “In the past,” Clarke says, “they were very reluctant to attack each other.”

The current prominence of Robert Kennedy Jr. — what Patrick expects will be a footnote to a larger narrative — doesn’t stand out merely because of what he says and how it departs from family history. It stands out because he is the rare Kennedy these days engaged in national electoral politics.

For generations, the Kennedy dynasty ranked with the Adamses, the Roosevelts and the Bushes. Their time in public office dates to the 1890s, to Rep. (and future Boston Mayor) John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, JFK’s grandfather, and grew throughout the first half of the 20th century.

During JFK’s 1960-63 presidency, governing was decidedly a family affair. Robert Kennedy was attorney general and the president’s closest adviser, brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was heading the newly formed Peace Corps and brother-in-law Stephen Smith was White House chief of staff. Youngest brother Ted Kennedy was elected to John F. Kennedy’s former Senate seat in Massachusetts.

The death of President Kennedy, and Jacqueline Kennedy’s remembrance of his administration as a lost golden age, “Camelot,” intensified feelings about the family and longings for their presence. Ted Kennedy became a revered liberal voice and legislator, while Shriver was chosen as George McGovern’s running mate in their unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign.

Patrick Kennedy was an eight-term congressman from Rhode Island; Joseph Kennedy II, Robert’s son, served six terms as a congressman from Massachusetts; and Joseph’s sibling Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was a two-term Maryland lieutenant governor. Arnold Schwarzenegger, married at the time to JFK’s niece Maria Shriver, was California’s governor for two terms.

But the Kennedys have mostly withdrawn from electoral politics in the 21st century; no Kennedy or Kennedy in-law currently serves in Congress or as a governor. Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter and only surviving child, had been open in 2009 to replacing Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate after Clinton was appointed secretary of state by President Barack Obama. She soon stepped back amid signs New York Gov. David Paterson would not select her. He didn’t.

“Given what happened to their father and uncle, and given the tough road Ted Kennedy had to travel, who can blame them for finding another road?” ” says historian Sean Wilentz. He says the assassinations of JFK and Robert Kennedy may have led to there being “too much of a burden on the next generation to carry on and complete what was left unfinished.”

Patrick Kennedy, who left Congress in 2011 amid struggles with substance abuse and bipolar disorder, agrees the current political atmosphere is far removed from the 1960s, when leaders such as JFK had a sense of “common purpose.” But he still believes public office worth pursuing and notes that his wife, Amy, ran for Congress in 2020 — unsuccessfully.

“When we got out there and campaigned, it was very inspiring,” Patrick Kennedy says. “There were tons of people in the grass roots who were so inspiring — to see how they were so passionate about changing the world.”

The Kennedy administration now lives on more in spirit than in firsthand memory. One of the last prominent White House aides, speechwriter Richard Goodwin, died in 2018. The last of President Kennedy’s surviving siblings, former U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Smith, died in 2020. Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, is in her 90s and rarely comments publicly.

Starting in 1968, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy was the family’s standard bearer and chosen orator. But no one has succeeded him since his death in 2009. The death of Caroline’s brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., in a 1999 plane crash ended the life of his generation’s most prominent family member, the one most discussed as a possible presidential candidate. Caroline Kennedy has maintained a low profile as ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration and ambassador to Australia in the Biden administration.

“That’s an awesome responsibility and a huge yoke around your neck to try and have to carry that,” Patrick Kennedy says of his father’s stature. “And Dad really did it — he really kept it together. But it was an incredible personal toll it took on him.”

Asked if he would have liked to take on his father’s role, Kennedy says no: “That chapter is closed.”

In the absence of any old-style family elder, the Kennedy most talked about is RFK Jr., who has attracted a larger following than most independent candidates. Historian Julian E. Zelizer, author of numerous works on contemporary politics, sees JFK and his brother Robert as “unifying figures” while finding Robert Jr. a symbol of “division, distrust, and a kind of skepticism about the public culture.”

Patrick Kennedy, who otherwise declined to discuss his cousin at length, called Zelizer’s comments “a pretty fair statement.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment but issued a statement on the anniversary and on his uncle’s legacy.

“During his term in office, he upheld a vision of America as a nation of peace, a vision that was abandoned after his death,” said Kennedy, who promised to “put us back on the road to peace.”

Other family members remain active in various causes, though in a less publicized way than in JFK’s time.

Besides Caroline, several Kennedys hold positions in the Biden administration, including Joseph Kennedy III, grandson of Robert Kennedy, who is special envoy to Northern Ireland; and Victoria Reggie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s widow and now ambassador to Austria.

Patrick Kennedy is founder of the mental health advocacy group Alignment for Progress and notes that the last bill signed into law by JFK, the Community Mental Health Act, is “the foundation of a modern day movement to restore a community based approach to our mental health and addiction crisis.”

Timothy Shriver chairs the board of the Special Olympics, which his mother (and President Kennedy’s sister), Eunice Shriver, helped establish in the 1960s. Kerry Kennedy, Robert’s daughter, is a human rights lawyer who heads the nonprofit RFK Human Rights. Kerry’s sister Rory Kennedy is a prize-winning documentary maker whose subjects have ranged from rural Mississippi and the Iraq War to a film about her mother, Ethel.

“There are many other ways to serve the public than running for elective office,” says political analyst Larry Sabato. “No one could say the Kennedy family hasn’t made many contributions to public life — and sacrifices, too.”

“I can literally go through all of my family and there isn’t one who’s not out there doing something,” says Patrick Kennedy, who finds his name still holds great influence in his current work. “I’ve been out of office since 2011, and I can get anyone to return my call.”

Through the first eight months of 2023, the ALA tracked 695 challenges to library materials and services, compared to 681 during the same time period last year, and a 20% jump in the number of “unique titles” involved to 1,915. School libraries had long been the predominant target, but in 2023 reports have been near-equally divided between schools and libraries open to the general public, the ALA announced Wednesday.

“The irony is that you had some censors who said that those who didn’t want books pulled from schools could just go to the public libraries,”’ says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

The ALA defines a challenge as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, the association recorded just 377 challenges, involving 566 titles. The numbers fell in 2020, when many libraries were closed, but have since risen to the most in the association’s 20-plus year history of compiling data. Because the totals are based on media accounts and reports submitted by librarians, the ALA regards its numbers as snapshots, with many incidents left unrecorded.

Continuing a trend over the past two years, the challenges are increasingly directed against multiple titles. In 2023, complaints about 100 or more works were recorded by the ALA in 11 states, compared to six last year and none in 2021. The most sweeping challenges often originate with such conservative organizations as Moms for Liberty, which has organized banning efforts nationwide and called for more parental control over books available to children.

“There used to be a roughly one-to-one ratio, where a parent would complain about an individual book, like in the days when many were objecting to Harry Potter,” Caldwell-Stone says. “Now you have people turning up at meetings and asking that 100 titles be removed.”

The ALA released its numbers in advance of its annual banned books week, Oct. 1-7, when libraries highlight challenged works. Earlier this year, the association issued its annual top 10 list of the books most objected to in 2022, many of them featuring racial and/or LGBTQ themes. Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” topped the list, followed by George Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

Attacks against teachers and librarians have been ongoing in 2023.

At Chapin High School in South Carolina, some students alleged that a teacher made them feel “ashamed to be Caucasian” for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” an open letter to his son about police violence against Black people that won the National Book Award in 2015. The school removed the book from the syllabus.

In Fort Royal, Virginia, the county board of supervisors is planning to drastically cut funding for the Samuels Public Library in response to conservative complaints about books with gay, lesbian and transgender characters. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill which calls for books depicting sex acts to be removed from school libraries.

Some attacks have affected the library association itself. The ALA’s opposition to bannings has led some communities to withdraw their membership, including Campbell County in Wyoming and a local library in Midland, Texas. Missouri officials announced the state would be leaving the ALA at a time when recent laws limited access for young people to books considered inappropriate for their age.

“I think this trend is going to continue,” Caldwell-Stone says, “at least for as long these groups want to go after whole categories of books.”