Richard Poirier 1925-2009

 Richard Poirier, the founder of Raritan and the chairman of the board of the Library of America, died on Saturday. He wrote his first review for the LRB in December 1979, on David Halberstam's The Powers that Be. Many pieces followed, on Melville, William James, Henry James, Whitman, Pynchon, Bellow – and Norman Podhoretz. His last, in 2003, was about Vivienne Eliot.