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, in every sense of the word, was a professional writer, the writer other writers loved to read just to see how he did it. Absent fad or fashion, he wrote novels that in lesser hands would be 600 pages long, but his, because of the clarity of his mind and because of his limpid prose, were rarely more than 200 pages. He was ever an outsider, a Catholic in his native Belfast, an Irishman in Canada, a Canadian in California, and he always had the outsider’s laser ability to illuminate the human condition.