Suicide by shotgun

The L.A. Times has the story.

Tristan Egolf was an outstanding writer who's potential body of work will be sorely missed. As I've written before, "Lord of the Barnyard," Egolf's debut novel, is among the few that I habitually re-read. The L.A. times says:

The author was better known in Lancaster, however, as a member of the Smoketown Six, a group of antiwar protesters who caused a stir when they stripped to thong underwear during a July 2004 campaign stop in Smoketown, Pa., by President Bush. The six young men were re-enacting the infamous photo of a human pyramid of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

It's not the end of his political activism that I mourn, rather the future literary works we've been denied. Much like John Kennedy Toole, personal demons have lured yet another talented young author to take his own life. (Why is it that liberal artists, especially good ones, tend to be so unhappy? I remember reading William F. Buckley's novel "See You Later Alligator" when I was in middle school and he was then an old man. And WFB is still around.)

More from the Times:

From [age] 11 to 18, he spent long summer stretches visiting the family of his father, who died when Egolf was a youth, in a southern Indiana town near the Kentucky border. A fictionalized version of the community would show up as the unpleasant burg at the center of "Lord of the Barnyard" [...]

When I read "Lord of the Barnyard" I didn't have to be told that it was set in semi-rural, southern Indiana. It just came through in the writing. That's how good it was.

Mr. Tristan Egolf, a decidedly gifted author with intimate knowledge of Kentuckiana, dead at age 33.

[Cross posted at the Coalition]