One of my favorite writers, Dominick Dunne, died in New York City, age 83, after 30 years of writing books and magazine articles, mining society for stories, and focusing on criminal justice and crimes of the century. Although I never read his creative fiction, what I liked about Dunne's writing is the simple clarity of it. It was as if he had taken the advice of the classic book WRITING WELL. His turn of the phrase was never dependent on fanciness.
This is what Grayden Carter, editor of Vanity Fair magazine, had to say about him in the November 2009 Editors Letter:
"Dominick died in his penthouse apartment in Manhattan on August 26, at the age of 83, just having completed his last novel, Too Much Money, which will be published in December. A failed, divorced, alcoholic Hollywood producer at 50, he famously recaptured his life and produced an astonishing body of work in the years left to him. Through his hundreds of articles and diary entries for Vanity Fair, his six novels, and his presence at countless dinner parties and social events in this country and abroad, he became one of the most loved and recognizable writers in the world..."
