Brian Moore: An Appreciation

Editor’s Note: Brian Moore died last week in Malibu at the age of 77. In 1994, he was given the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement by The Times for his many novels. To mark his passing, Book Review asked several colleagues and friends to comment on his life and work.

Brian truly honored fiction--by his reading of it, by his respect for it and most of all, by the wit and intelligence and power he brought to the writing of it. He understood the craft, the discipline, and he understood equally the discipline required to practice it. He had no patience for the postures and quasi-celebrity of the literary life; writing was just what he did most days of his life, and he never stopped being thrilled by it, taking risks with it, taking it to the far edge of where he knew it could go.