Marc Jaffe was at a New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood in 1967 when a screenwriter named William Peter Blatty began chatting him up. Mr. Blatty said he had tried and failed to sell an idea for a novel — about a young girl possessed by a demon and the tortured priest who tries to save her. But Mr. Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam Books, the paperback publishing house in New York City, thought the idea had merit, and Mr. Jaffe gave him an advance of $26,000 to secure the rights to the novel, The Exorcist, which sold nearly a half-million copies and made the best-seller lists. What followed was the 1973 movie adaptation, which in turn boosted more paperback sales. By 1974, 10 million copies had been sold, making it, at the time, the second-best-selling paperback of all time, behind Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and ahead of Erich Segal’s Love Story.

An editor is lucky,” Mr. Jaffe told Clarence Petersen, author of The Bantam Story: Thirty Years of Paperback Publishing, “if he has one like that in his career.” As it happened, Mr. Jaffe had many, including Catcher in the Rye and Jaws.

Marc Jaffe, died on Dec. 31 at his home in Williamstown, MA. He was 102.

Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand how to comfort and communicate with older adults.

When she died on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, OR, at the age of 91, she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and their caregivers. Her method calls for caregivers to empathize with disoriented individuals in an effort to reduce their stress and support their dignity, rather than try to impose reality on them.

Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general argued against abortion rights and affirmative action before the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the conservative legal movement’s rightward march, calling the current high court “reactionary” — died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 88.

In 2021, as the high court’s Republican-appointed supermajority looked likely to reverse Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in an opinion column for The New York Times, “To overturn Roe now would be an act of constitutional vandalism.” His reasoning was that a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, had more firmly established the right to abortion than when he opposed it for the Reagan White House.

He became an outspoken critic of the Roberts Court over its rulings limiting voting rights, labor unions, campaign finance reform, and its refusal to limit blatant partisan gerrymandering, believing in change that is incremental and not radical.

Mr. Fried spent nearly 60 years on the Harvard Law School faculty.

Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas. He was 98.

In all, 56 people died in the collision of the two ships. In Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, Mr. Moscow described the dramatic last moments of the Italian ship.

Berish Strauch, a plastic surgeon whose pioneering procedures to reattach or replace vital body parts included one of the first toe-to-thumb transplants, died on Dec. 24 in Greenwich, CT. He was 90.

As the longtime chief of reconstructive surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Strauch devised many of the surgical procedures and technologies that are now considered commonplace. After a New York City firefighter lost his thumb in 1976, Dr. Strauch tried to reattach it. When that proved impossible, he suggested something more radical: taking one of the man’s big toes and sewing it in place of the severed digit. Not only did the surgery work, but within a few months, the firefighter was back on the job.

Howard Golden, who as Brooklyn borough president for a quarter-century pressed to strengthen the borough economically, and defended it against slights real or perceived in the years before it experienced a gentrifying revival, died on Jan. 24 at his home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. He was 98.

Mr. Golden’s career in politics developed as he moved up in Brooklyn’s Democratic party. He was a city councilman from Borough Park for seven years before being chosen to fill the borough president’s post temporarily when it became vacant on Jan. 3, 1977. He won election to his first full term later that year. His 25-year run ended on Dec. 31, 2001.

Mr. Golden remained a lifelong champion of Brooklyn, his pride in the borough unshakable. In a speech in 2000, he said, “There are two kinds of people in this world — those that come from Brooklyn, and those that wish they did.”