Maxine Clair, who managed a feat that many a middle-aged pencil-pusher can only dream of — namely, leaving her office job behind to become an acclaimed poet and novelist — died on Sept. 5 in Washington. She was 86.
Her daughter, Adrienne Clair, said she died during a brief stay in a hospital.
Ms. Clair was a 55-year-old hospital administrator in Washington when she published her first work of fiction, “Rattlebone” (1994), a collection of linked stories centered on a Black girl named Irene growing up in 1950s Kansas City Kan., Ms. Clair’s hometown.
Published by the prestigious firm Farrar, Straus & Giroux, it received universal praise for Ms. Clair’s steady, unshowy narrative style, as well as her ability to evoke an entire world around a single young character.
“There is much to admire in Maxine Clair’s ‘Rattlebone,’” Charles Larson wrote in The Chicago Tribune. “Above all, one celebrates the quiet assurance of her talent.”
The book drew comparisons with other, similarly structured works, like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919). It also recalled works, like Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place” (1982), about life in segregated communities — Rattlebone is a fictionalized African American neighborhood — that focused as much on the humanity of their inhabitants as on the pity of the people’s circumstances.
“When I wrote ‘Rattlebone,’” Ms. Clair told the writer W. Ralph Eubanks in a 2023 interview for The Sewanee Review, “the driving idea was to tell the story of a Black girl coming of age — somewhat naïve in ways and wise in others — who was just a real person trying to become an adult.”
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