Ira Levin, 1929 - 2007.

Ira Levin, a mild-mannered playwright and novelist who liked nothing better than to give people the creeps - and who did so repeatedly, with best-selling novels like Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil - died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

Margalit Fox, New York Times.

See also: the NNDB, Jane W Stedman and Wikipedia.

Updated through 11/15.

Update: "Some might regard him as an example of that charmed and clownish breed: hack writers who inspire great movies," blogs the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "Yet it's not as simple as that. Yes, Levin was a rudimentary prose stylist - but then a Nabokovian prose style doesn't amount to a hill of beans in Hollywood. What matters are stories and ideas, and Levin had these in abundance."

Update, 11/15: "There can be no better way to mourn the passing of the novelist and playwright Ira Levin, at the age of 78, than late in the evening to pour a glass of bourbon, start reading his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying - and wonder what that knocking in the pipes might really be," writes Christopher Hawtree in the Guardian. "For, at his best, Levin plumbed the depths. He wrote only seven novels, but... [a]long with these was a real stage stunner, the long-running Broadway comic thriller Deathtrap."

Posted by dwhudson at November 14, 2007 12:25 AM