Biographer and critic Hazel Rowley has passed away at the age of 59. She wrote biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (Tete a Tete), Richard Wright, and Christina Stead, as well as the 2010 first-couple study Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage. Rowley was an accomplished essayist and frequent contributor to Bookforum, in which she wrote about Wright and the 1950s culture wars, Beavoir’s 1960 trip to Brazil, and Paris’s legendary Village Voice bookstore.
