Willis, Ellen Jane 1941-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born December 14, 1941, in New York, NY; died of lung cancer, November 9, 2006, in New York, NY. Critic, editor, and author. A former critic for the New Yorker, Willis was a noted leftist intellectual who also wrote for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, and Ms. An alumna of Barnard College, where she graduated in 1962, she attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley for a year. During the turbulent 1960s, she cofounded the feminist Redstockings group, which regularly campaigned for abortion laws. Later, in the 1980s, she also was a founder of the street theater protest group called the No More Nice Girls, which similarly advocated abortion rights. During her early career, Willis was a freelance writer and briefly worked for Cheetah magazine. The New Yorker hired her in 1967 to be its pop music critic. She remained there until 1975, simultaneously working as an associate editor for Us in 1969 and as a contributing editor to Ms.in the early 1970s. From 1976 to 1978 she was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and then she joined the Village Voice writing staff. At the time of her death, she was a journalism professor at New York University, where she had founded the cultural reporting and criticism program in 1995. Willis not only wrote about music but was also a social critic with strong leftist leanings. Despite such political tendencies, she sometimes came out against groups such as feminists and antiwar demonstrators. For example, she was skeptical of the feminist goal of banning pornography, and she interpreted the antiIsrael position some leftists took as a form of antiSemitism. Willis more recently came out in favor of the war against Iraq, having a distaste for the authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein. In general, Willis viewed herself as a resister to authority; as a journalism teacher, she encouraged her students to think critically of both leftist and rightist biases, neither one of which were to be fully trusted at face value. Willis published her essays in several collections over the years, including Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992), and Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2006, Section 4, p. 10.

Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2006, p. B8.

New York Times, November 10, 2006, p. A29.

Washington Post, November 17, 2006, p. B7.