Nora Johnson (1933–2017)

The writer Nora Johnson has died at the age of eighty-four. Johnson is best known for the novel The World of Henry Orient (1958). She and her father Nunnally Johnson co-wrote the screenplay for the 1964 film adaptation.

I read The World of Henry Orient for the first time in 2011 and wrote to Nora Johnson to tell her how much I liked it. In her reply she said that she thought the novel “would go stale very fast — but seems I was wrong.” The novel now feels like a sweet, sad evocation of a lost New York.

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