The Writer Who Made the Obituary Feel Like Literature

The Desk Nobody Chose

Most journalists do not dream of writing obituaries. The form carries a reputation for boilerplate: dates, titles, a polite sentence about contributions, then the door. Margalit Fox understood this reputation intimately. When she moved from The New York Times Book Review to the obituary department in 2004, she arrived not because the work had called to her, but because she feared what would appear on her own tombstone someday.

"I started as an editor at the Times Book Review," Fox told The Paris Review in a 2014 interview. "It was wonderful to be around books and people that love books, but the job itself was copyediting. I was afraid that all they'd be able to put on my tombstone was 'She Changed Fifty-Thousand Commas into Semicolons.'"

That fear drove her toward a desk that most reporters viewed as a quiet landing pad, not a proving ground. What happened over the next fourteen years would reshape how readers, editors, and fellow journalists thought about what an obituary could be. By the time she retired from the Times in 2018, Fox had authored more than 1,400 obituaries, each one carrying the weight of a life compressed into a few hundred words. But unlike the formulaic send-offs that populate smaller papers, her pieces read like compact works of narrative nonfiction. Readers who came for the subject stayed because the writing itself had voltage.

A Linguist in the Newsroom

Fox's path to the obituary desk ran through linguistics first. Born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1961, she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University by 1983. That training in how language works, how meaning forms, and how words carry history would prove unexpectedly useful in a career spent choosing exactly the right ones.

She later refined her writing craft with a master's from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1991, then spent the 1980s working in book and magazine publishing before joining The New York Times in 1994 as a copy editor for its Book Review. For a decade, she lived inside other people's prose, sharpening sentences that belonged to reviewers and authors. The move to obituaries in 2004 was not a lateral step. It was a chance to write with full bylines again, and to do it on a beat that most journalists had written off.

The transition mattered. Fox brought editorial discipline, literary range, and a linguist's sensitivity to rhythm and meaning into a department that had grown comfortable with formula. She did not sentimentalize the form or treat it as a softer corner of journalism. She treated it as a place where explanation still mattered, where a death notice could also be a short history of a field, a technology, a custom, or a forgotten corner of public life.

What 1,400 Endings Teach a Writer

The scale of Fox's output at The New York Times is difficult to grasp without context. More than 1,400 obituaries in fourteen years works out to roughly one every three and a half days, accounting for weekends and holidays. That volume either breaks a writer or forges a ruthless sense of what makes a life legible fast. For Fox, it seems to have done the latter.

"In nearly twenty years and twelve hundred obituaries, Margalit Fox, a senior writer at the New York Times, has chronicled the lives of such personages as the president of Estonia, an underwater cartographer, and the inventor of Stove Top Stuffing," wrote Alex Ronan for The Paris Review in 2014. "An instrumental figure in pushing the obituary past Victorian-era formal constraints, Fox produces features-style write-ups of her subjects whether they're ubiquitous public figures, comparatively unknown men and women whose inventions have changed the world, or suicidal poets."

The range of subjects she covered is itself a kind of argument about what the form can hold. The president of Estonia. An underwater cartographer. The inventor of Stove Top Stuffing. These are not the figures who typically anchor magazine profiles, yet Fox approached each with the same seriousness of craft. She understood that a life could matter because of a mechanism, a phrase, a field, or an object most readers had never thought to ask about. The obituary became, in her hands, a form of public education. A reader arrives at a death and leaves with a small history of something in the world.

That generosity came from choosing the right scale. Fox could take a career that looked tiny from far away and show the mechanism by which it touched ordinary life. She could also give grandeur to public figures without flattening them. Her obituaries for Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, Maurice Sendak, and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers appeared in the pages of The New York Times alongside quieter inventors and tinkerers whose work had slipped into everyday life unnoticed.

The Advance and the Art of Writing Before Death

One of the least understood aspects of obituary writing at a paper like The New York Times is the practice of writing "advances" obituaries composed years before a subject dies, filed and waiting. Fox was prolific in this discipline. When she left the Times in 2018, she departed with about eighty advance obituaries that continued to give her bylines years later, sometimes decades later.

"Fox didn't need to come out of retirement in 2019 when Toni Morrison died to memorialize the renowned novelist," noted H. Rambsy at Cultural Front in April 2025. "Editors just needed to add the date of death to the advance that Fox had produced in previous years."

This practice requires a particular kind of imagination: writing about a living person with the assumption of their death already in view. Fox spoke about this openly in interviews, describing how the work skews one's worldview. "We all watch old movies with an eye toward who's getting on in age," she told The Paris Review. "I watch the Oscars memorial presentation and sit there going, Did him, did her, didn't do that one. For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That's all there is."

The humor in that observation is characteristic. Fox's prose in her obituaries often carried wit alongside depth, a combination that made readers linger on subjects they might otherwise have skimmed past. She found what she called "the odd hinge between an individual life and some larger historical shift," a phrase that captures both her subject matter and her method.

Black Poets and the Shape of Historical Memory

Among Fox's most significant work were her obituaries for Black poets, a category where the obituary as a form intersects directly with questions of historical record and literary criticism. She wrote send-offs for Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Jayne Cortez, and Ai, among others. For some of these figures, particularly Clifton and Cortez, her obituaries represented the most extensive treatment they had received in The New York Times.

"Fox's obituaries for those figures were among the most thorough treatments amid several tributes that flowed forth after they died," Rambsy observed at Cultural Front. "Fox's writing assisted in ensuring that Black poets received important tributes. Her work stands as a reminder for how obituary writing can serve as both literary criticism and historical record."

This observation points to something Fox herself seemed to understand intuitively: the obituary is not merely a record of death but a statement about what a life meant. When a writer chooses which details to include, which context to build, and which connections to draw, they are making an argument about significance. Fox made that argument with care and rigor, recovering overlooked figures from history, particularly women, to correct the historical record and explore broader social themes.

From Obituaries to Nonfiction Books

Fox's work at The New York Times was not the whole story. Parallel to her journalism, she authored several nonfiction books that showcased the same qualities she brought to the obituary desk: rigorous research, narrative drive, and a gift for making complex subjects feel urgent. Her first book, Talking Hands (2007), explored sign language and the mind. Her second, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (2013), traced the decipherment of the Linear B script and won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2014. The New York Times also named it one of the "100 Notable Books of 2013."

"The Paris Review called Fox 'An instrum...'" according to Wikipedia, though the full quote was cut off in the source material. The partial phrase suggests the publication recognized her as an instrumental figure in contemporary letters, a judgment supported by the breadth of her work.

She continued with Conan Doyle for the Defense (2018), which examined a real case that consumed Arthur Conan Doyle in his later years, and The Confidence Men (2021), a narrative about confidence men aboard an American ship in the nineteenth century that was later adapted for film. In 2024, she published The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, returning to the kind of overlooked historical figure she had often profiled in her obituaries.

Her books demonstrate a consistent philosophy: every life holds a meaningful story worth telling with clarity and elegance. Whether she was writing about an ancient code, a Victorian detective writer, or a nineteenth-century con artist, she brought the same narrative instincts she had honed on the obituary desk. The form changed; the approach did not.

The Legacy of a Literary Obituarist

Fox retired from The New York Times in 2018 to write books full-time, but her influence on the obituary form continues to be felt. She raised public expectations for biographical writing, demonstrating that a death notice could be as carefully crafted as a magazine profile or a short essay. Her work blurred the lines between journalism and literature, treating the compressed biography as a venue for wit, depth, and historical context.

The awards she received tell part of this story. The Newswomen's Club of New York awarded her its Front Page Award in 2011 for her collection of work at The New York Times and again in 2015 for "beat reporting." Since 2013, she has been a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, a role that suits a writer whose sentences have always been notable for their precision.

But the deeper legacy is harder to measure. It lives in the readers who discovered that an obituary could surprise them, that a death notice could make them laugh or think or feel the weight of a life they had never known. It lives in the writers who followed, who understood that the form did not have to be formulaic. And it lives in the obituaries still being published under her byline, advances she wrote years ago, filed and waiting for the day they would be needed.

Why This Matters

For readers of ArticlEye, Fox's career offers a case study in what happens when a skilled writer treats a dismissed form with full seriousness. The obituary is easy to overlook. Most readers scroll past it on their way to something they consider more important. But Fox demonstrated that the form's brevity is not a limitation; it is a constraint that rewards craft. When every word must count, the writer's choices become visible. The result, at its best, is a compressed piece of narrative journalism that carries more weight per column inch than many longer forms.

This matters for anyone who writes about people, institutions, or ideas. The obituary teaches economy. It teaches the value of finding the telling detail, the unexpected connection, the sentence that does the work of a paragraph. Fox's approach to the form treating it as explanatory literature, as a place where wit and depth could coexist offers a model for anyone who wants to make their writing feel alive more than dutiful.

Where to Read Further

Fox's obituaries for major figures are archived at The New York Times byline page, where readers can explore her work on Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, and dozens of others. Her 2014 interview with The Paris Review, cited throughout this article, offers the most direct window into her philosophy of the form. For her nonfiction books, The Riddle of the Labyrinth remains the most celebrated, winning the Saroyan Prize and earning a place among the Times's 100 Notable Books of 2013. Those interested in her work on Black poets will find extended analysis at Cultural Front's examination of her poet obituaries.