While the comics world mourns the loss of Harvey Pekar, there is not yet word on the cause of the writer’s death. He suffered from several problems, including prostate cancer, depression, asthma and high blood pressure, a police officer said.
Pekar, 70, was found dead early Monday at his Cleveland home. His wife, Joyce Brabner, said he went to bed about 4:30 p.m. Sunday in fine spirits.
Actor Paul Giamatti, who portrayed Pekar in the award-winning movie ‘American Splendor’, said in a statement that Pekar “had a huge brain and an even bigger soul. And he was hilarious. He was a great artist, a true American poet, and there is no one to replace him”.
A blog posting on the Cleveland Plain Dealer website noted the city’s loss of the writer – and that of LeBron James: “Unlike some basketball player that just left, the loss of Mr. Pekar is a major loss for the city and literature. RIP Harvey.”
In another piece, the cleveland.com said that “underneath his persona of aggravated, disaffected file clerk, he was an erudite book and jazz critic, and a writer of short stories that many observers compared to Chekhov, despite their comic-book form.”
Although Pekar was best-known for his ongoing autobiographical series “American Splendor,” several of his last books touched on “people’s histories” of America. One of Pekar’s last books was “Students for a Democratic Life” (2008), which Cliff Froehlich reviewed for the Post-Dispatch:
For more than three decades, the perpetually dyspeptic Pekar has chronicled the quotidian details of his own working-class life. Lately, however, he’s been looking out the window rather than staring in the mirror, and his most recent books, “Ego and Hubris” and “Macedonia, ” have largely focused on other people and outside events.
Pekar is listed as contributing an afterward in an upcoming book for young adults, “FDR and The New Deal For Beginners,” and this year also marked his history of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs in “The Beats.” The FDR book has an on-sale date of July 20.
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