Over a long and productive career as a writer, Lore Segal left a striking mark. Segal was a translator, children’s book author, and novelist, and her works of fiction and nonfiction alike resound with a bracing honesty, an openness and a nonjudgmental stance on the material of life. As Michele Moses argues in a career-spanning essay, this candidness was defined by a curiosity about the world. Full of “an irrepressible gusto,” Segal’s body of work helped her readers metabolize the great and minor events of the 20th century. For Moses, “the pleasures of writing and language always lie at the center” of Segal’s writing, “embodied by the excitable intellects of her characters, and by a mischievous sense of humor that appears on just about every page.” Until the end of her life, in fact, and even until the very week of her death at 96, Segal kept writing “with the disarming blend of youthful curiosity and daring intelligence that was a hallmark of her work since the beginning of her writing career.” Read “Lore Segal’s Stubborn Optimism”