A Trove of Words to Remember From a Master Obituary Writer

The byline Robert D. McFadden has been one of the most distinguished in the history of The New York Times, one that has been affixed to hundreds upon hundreds of exactingly reported and artfully composed pieces since he joined the newspaper 63 years ago, beginning a Times career remarkable not just for its craftsmanship and productivity but also for its longevity. He retired on Sunday at 87.

Bob first achieved distinction as a “rewrite man,” a reporter who would take on some of the biggest breaking-news stories of the day — a jetliner crash, a historic blackout, the destruction of the World Trade Center — without ever leaving his newsroom desk.

Reporters in the field covering an event would feed him reams of information, and he would take it all down, a telephone receiver shouldered against one ear, his fingers flying across the keys of a typewriter and later a computer keyboard. Then he’d funnel the information — it could never be too much — into a sweeping account full of detail, color, voices and drama. His rewrite prowess was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.

But Bob had a second act in store: as an obituary writer. For the last decade or more he chronicled hundreds of consequential lives, some famous and some less so. But even there he was singular — because his mission was not to write about people after they died, the usual sequence, but while those subjects still lived. He wrote their obituaries in advance, each deeply researched, thoroughly reported and fluidly written. Then he’d file them away — sometimes for years — until they were finally needed, when death came knocking.

These were luminous portraits — always framing people against the broader historical canvas in which they lived, but never losing sight of the granular and often revealing details that complete the picture, that render any life as unlike any other.