Prolific Author And Jazz Writer Nat Hentoff Dies At 91

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Nat Hentoff, the author of dozens of books and decades of columns, has died at 91.

His son Nick Hentoff confirmed his father's death on Twitter Saturday night.

Hentoff was a writer for the Village Voice for 50 years. He also wrote for many publications over his lengthy career, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, United Media syndicate and Down Beat magazine.

He frequently wrote about issues surrounding civil liberties — the Voice describes him as a "civil libertarian." His 1982 novel The Day They Came to Arrest the Book tells the story of a high school that seeks to remove the book Huckleberry Finn from the school curriculum and library over racism and other issues. A student from the school newspaper fights the effort — an allegory on censorship.

He also was a lover and frequent writer on jazz music. From age 11, he was hooked on the genre after hearing the song "Nightmare" by Artie Shaw coming through an open door at a record store.

"It just reached inside me," Hentoff told NPR's Guy Raz in 2010. "I rushed into the store, 'What was that?' "

Over the six decades he spent covering jazz, he attended plenty of performances and met many musicians.

He "got to be very good friends" with jazz great Dizzy Gillespie. At one point, he sat in on a recording session featuring Abbey Lincoln, Coleman Hawkins and Max Roach. "The music just became part of you as you heard it," Hentoff said of the experience.

His most memorable show he attended was Duke Ellington "with his full orchestra" at Symphony Hall in Boston, playing the jazz work "Black, Brown and Beige."

"It was the history of black people in the United States from slavery to the present," Hentoff told NPR in 2010. "And it was so extraordinary. At the end ... people were so moved they could barely applaud until they gave a standing ovation."

Hentoff started writing for the Village Voice in 1958 until he was "excessed" in 2008 by new managers. A few days after his firing, he told NPR that condolences he received from readers afterward were "like reading one's obituary while you're still alive." But he vowed to keep writing.

In his final column for the Voice in 2009, he recalled advice he received from one of his mentors in journalism, the muckraker I.F. Stone: