RIP Robb Forman Dew

I was sad to hear, belatedly, that the author Robb Forman Dew had died on May 22, 1920, at the age of 73, of a heart problem. I read her first and perhaps still most famous novel, “Dale Loves Sophie to Death” (1981) when it came out, and later read her other novels. She is known for, as the New York Times obituary put it, her unhurried “carefully etched novels of family life” that made her “one of our premier chroniclers of everyday life.” Readers of this blog know that these kinds of novels are among my most cherished. Dew was raised in the South, and felt she was shaped by her time there. Her becoming an author was partially influenced by her maternal grandfather, the well-known poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, with whom Dew was close. As a young adult, she formed lifelong friendships with several women writers, including Gail Godwin, Nancy Thayer, Louise Erdrich, and Anne Tyler. Besides her novels, she wrote a memoir, “The Family Heart” (1994), about her and her husband’s reaction to one of her sons’ coming out as gay. I am truly sad to hear of Dew’s death, especially at this relatively young age. Forty years after reading Dew’s first novel, and having read her other novels as well, I am inspired to re-read some or all of them; they are now on my to-read list.