DOERR, Harriet 1910-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born April 8, 1910, in Pasadena, CA; died of complications from a broken hip November 24, 2002, in Pasadena, CA. Author. Doerr was a late-blooming writer who won an American Book Award in 1984 for her first novel, Stones of Ibarra (1984). The daughter of a railroad tycoon, she attended Smith College from 1927 to 1928 before transferring to Stanford University for two years. When she married, Doerr left school to take care of her family. After her husband died in 1972, she took writing classes at Scripps College from 1975 to 1976 and then went back to Stanford, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1977. Doerr drew on her experiences with her husband when they lived in Mexico to pen the novels Stones for Ibarra and Consider This, Señora (1993), as well as to write the stories collected in her 1990 work Under the Aztec Sun. Her last book, The Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions (1995) includes fiction and essays, some of which are about the death of her son from cancer, a disease that also killed her parents, husband, and five of her siblings. Though she began her writing career late in life, Doerr was praised by critics for her artful and meticulous writing style, a talent that garnered her many awards, from the American Book Award to prizes from the PEN Center U.S.A. West, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Commonwealth Club of California.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

Chicago Tribune, November 26, 2002, section 1, p. 13.

Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2002, p. A1.

New York Times, November 27, 2002, p. C19.

Times (London, England), December 12, 2002.

Washington Post, November 28, 2002, p. B7.