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Kevin Starr, the celebrated California historian, died over the weekend at 76.

Writing in The Times, William Grimes said Mr. Starr chronicled the state “with a novelist’s sense of narrative and character and a filmmaker’s eye for colorful detail.”

Mr. Starr likened writing to breathing, publishing more than a dozen books and numerous articles.

“If I don’t write, I get anxiety-ridden,” he once said in an interview with U.S.C. College Magazine.