Monroe Milstein, who purchased a derelict New Jersey garment plant and turned it into the nation’s third largest discount retailer, Burlington Coat Factory, died on May 9 at his home in Bal Harbour, FL. He was 98.

In 1972, he and his wife, Henrietta Milstein, ventured her savings as a Long Island teacher and transformed a former factory in Burlington, NJ, which they had bought for $675,000, into a mecca for busloads of frugal customers, lured from the Philadelphia metropolitan area and beyond to buy marked-down designer and brand-name coats for women and later, linens, men’s wear, baby clothes, and shoes. By the time they had divested themselves of their family-run company, it was operating 367 stores in 42 states and had recorded sales of $3.2 billion annually. The Milsteins sold their shares for $1.3 billion.

Susan Brownmiller, the feminist author, journalist and activist whose book, “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” helped define the modern view of rape, debunking it as an act of passion and reframing it as a crime of power and violence, died on May 24 in the Bronx. She was 90.

The book, published in 1975, was translated into a dozen languages and ranked by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

The ascendant women’s movement was already opening the public’s eyes about sexual violence. Anti-rape groups had started to form in the early 1970s. Women were becoming empowered to take control of their bodies and their sexuality. Rape-crisis centers were opened, self-defense classes gained new popularity, and several states rewrote their laws to make it easier to prosecute rapists.

She devoted her life to writing and taught at Pace University into her ‘80s. She wrote scores of magazine articles and half a dozen books, plus some works of fiction.

Jesse Kornbluth, whose sly chronicles of cultural excess , celebrity and author profiles, personal essays, and investigative work enlivened magazines and newspapers, died on April 17 in Manhattan. He was 79.

He contributed to, among others, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and New Times, an alternative biweekly newsmagazine published in the 1970s. He also worked as a ghostwriter, wrote screenplays, and wrote or co-wrote a number of nonfiction books.

“Jesse was the expert on everything,” Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair said, “or could sound like one.”

Marcia Marcus, a figurative and conceptual artist with a bold contemporary style, died on March 27 in Manhattan. She was 97.

She painted portraits of the artists of her time, but her favorite subject was herself. She painted herself frequently in a variety of costumes and settings: She was a helmeted Athena, a Medusa, and a reclining nude. She placed herself in front of Masada in pearls and a red sheath.

Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic for The New York Times whose deep knowledge of Asia and Europe illuminated reporting from Tiananmen Square to the Bastille, and who wrote things as he saw them in 10 books driven by intellectual curiosity, died on March 31in Manhattan. He was 80.

In more than two decades at The Times, Mr. Bernstein brought deep historical knowledge, a gracious writing style, and a stubborn contrarian streak to subjects as diverse as the meaning of the French Revolution, the nature of Chinese authoritarianism, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, and the significance of parentheses in the politics of academic language.

Although not religious he joined a Torah study group late in life, intent on exploring the meaning of his Jewishness.

Jeremiah Ostriker, an astrophysicist who helped set off a revolution in humankind’s view of the universe, revealing it to be as vaster, darker realm than the one we can see, ruled by invisible forms of matter and energy we still don’t understand, died on April 13 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 87.

For more than four decades, mostly at Princeton University, Dr. Ostriker’s work altered our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve as he explored the nature of pulsars, the role of black holes in the evolution of the cosmos, and what the universe is made of. He won the National Medal of Science in 2000.

According to Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge and the Astronomer Royal, Dr. Ostriker would come up with pioneering ideas on novel themes. “He inspired younger colleagues and collaborators, not just at Princeton but around the world.”