Sting, there is thy death

Paul Fussell (Courtney Grant Winston)

From "The Lives They Lived: Paul Fussell", by Dwight Garner in The New York Times Magazine for December 30, 2012:

THE MOST PROFOUND TECTONIC SHIFT in our literary culture in 2012 was one that, by and large, no one noticed. The last of our great curmudgeonly essayists — Gore Vidal, the art critic Robert Hughes and the historian and social critic Paul Fussell — died this year. Add to this list of punishing, witty and literate writers Christopher Hitchens, who died at the end of 2011, and it begins to seem as if the Mayan calendar, which predicted global ruin, took aim instead at our stinging public intellectuals, our necessary horseflies.

... Perhaps the best places to encounter Fussell’s grit, erudition and whimsy are his two essay collections, “The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations” (1982) and “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” (1988). 

... Like Vidal, Hughes and Hitchens, Fussell was an intellectual malcontent, weaned on Orwell and on William Hazlitt, who wrote the surprisingly sunny essay “On the Pleasure of Hating.” We are unlikely to see their kind again.