Literary Deaths of 2022

In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them.

With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fiction as well as poetry and comic books. He was also a lawyer, a supervisor of a juvenile prison, and an advocate for abused children, sitting near President Bill Clinton in 1993 when he signed the National Child Protection Act into law. It established a national registry of convicted child abusers and was widely known as “the Oprah Bill” because Vachss had advocated for it on Oprah Winfrey’s television show. She sat beside Vachss at the White House signing ceremony.

Vachss (pronounced “vax”), who lost the sight in his right eye from a childhood accident, died of coronary artery disease on Nov. 23, 2021 at 79, but his death was not widely reported until months later. He published 18 hard-boiled crime novels featuring an antihero named Burke, an ex-con and unlicensed private investigator who doesn’t always play nice as he pursues people who prey on children. Vachss, unlike Burke, was not a victim of sexual abuse as a child, but, like Burke, he had a black-and-white view of such predators, including Westley Allan Dodd, who was executed by hanging in 1993 after he was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering three young boys. “Some predatory sociopaths can be deterred,” Vachss wrote at the time. “None can be rehabilitated…. What makes sexual predators so intractable and dangerous is that, as Mr. Dodd candidly acknowledged, they like what they do and intend to keep doing it.”

Burke had an equally uncompromising view of such monsters, and he treated them accordingly. Vachss explained his antihero’s unnerving rough edges this way: “I wanted to show people what hell looked like, and I didn’t think an angel would be the right guide.”

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Though never a household name, drew rapturous critical praise for his 1987 debut novel, , a fictional biography of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Duffy was unfazed when the dense and challenging book failed to catch on with readers. “You know,” he said at the time, “you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write. You’re not like a cow