Elizabeth Wright is Dying

By Nicholas Stix

I just checked on Elizabeth Wright’s blog for the first time in a few months, and I was shocked to see the following letter.

Monday, June 20, 2011

To all those friends I never met

If all goes according to plan, I shall be entering a hospice for cancer care. I wish I knew how to show my appreciation for all the fine minds I was able to interact with over the years, thanks to this technology. There are so many who I truly admire, and you know who you are. Your sensible and intelligent approach to politics and to life in general kept me sane throughout many crazed actions by our "leaders."

I regret the many writings, especially responses, unaccomplished, and the many deeds undone or unfinished. I do hope many find the posts on this blog worthwhile, and continue to read some of them.

Goodnight and goodnight.

-- Elizabeth

Hospices are places one goes to die. On July 6, Lew Rockwell wrote that she’s got the Big C. That might mean that her earlier reference to extreme shortness of breath was due to lung cancer.

I’ve never met or communicated with Elizabeth Wright, but have long admired her work. At her best, she seems like the reincarnation of my journalistic hero, George S. Schuyler, in the latter, Old Right, conservative half of his life, once he’d gotten over his youthful socialism and cosmopolitanism. (Wright called her journal, and then her Web site and blog, Issues and Views. Schuyler called his longtime Pittsburgh Courier column, “Views and Reviews.”) And her typical work is head and shoulders above that of 99 percent of the other scribblers working in the English language.

I have no idea how old Wright is, or if she is even still alive, where she lived prior to entering the hospice, whether she is tall, short, fat (prior to the cancer, anyway) or thin, pretty or plain, a smoker (though I now suspect she was) or a drinker. In an age of celebrity, in which writers’ books and columns are adorned with photographs of themselves, and they whore themselves at cocktail parties, she has privately led the life of a writer devoted to public matters.

All I know about her is that she is an excellent political writer, and a black woman.

If she yet abides, I wish her as painless an exit as possible. If she is gone, R.I.P.

Issues & Views - The Blog: A black conservative's place for independent thinking and common sense -- A little oasis for those who got caught up in the momentum of the civil rights movement, but failed to discern the false from the true

Issues & Views: The Web Site (via The Wayback Machine)