Stephen Rubin, a publisher who helped make John Grisham and Dan Brown famous writers, and who published Michael Wolff’s 2018 chronicle of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, died on Oct. 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.

“Trying to publish big-ticket best sellers is the riskiest game you can play,” Mr. Rubin wrote in his memoir, Words and Music: Confessions of an Optimist. “But it has been my modus operandi.” Among his successes are John Grisham’s first novel, A Time To Kill; Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada.

In his memoir, he said, “In an era when social media and cable television dominate the conversation, it is thrilling that one lone book could cut through all the static and have a profound effect on an entire nation.”

Evelyn Fox Keller, a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist and, beginning in the late 1970s, a feminist theorist who explored the way gender pervades and distorts scientific inquiry, died on Sept. 22 at an assisted living home in Cambridge, MA. She was 87,

Like many women in the sciences, she had faced years of disparagement and discrimination, and one of her first efforts was to quantify the effect such a hostile environment had on women — how it held them back, and how it drove many to leave science completely.

She pressed her argument in books, essays and speeches, often to packed auditoriums.

Florence Fisher, an adoptee who spend decades searching for her birth parents and then spent another half century fighting to open adoption records for millions of others, died on Oct. 1 in Brooklyn. She was 95.

Although she ultimately found her birth parents, the difficulties she dealt with — sealed records, silent families — made her think about what millions of other adoptees had faced.

“The impact that Florence had on the adoptee-rights movement cannot be overestimated,” said Lorraine Dusky, another advocate. “Florence came along at the right moment. With diligence, she achieved success state by state.”

Piper Laurie, a respected actress with three Oscar nominations, an Emmy Award, and eight other Emmy nominations, died on Oct. 14 at a nursing facility in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Moviegoers will recall her performances in “The Hustler,” “Carrie,” and “Children of a Lesser God.” She won an Emmy for “Promise,” a CBS movie about schizophrenia.

When asked in a 2011 interview with the Archive of American Television what acting advice she would offer, Ms. Laurie said that her childhood shyness may have helped her “learn to listen, really, deeply, fully.”

Alice Shalvi, an educator and social activist, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Jerusalem. She was 96.

Dr. Shalvi was best known for her leadership of Pelech, an experimental school in Jerusalem that provides an egalitarian secular and religious education for Orthodox girls, and for her work as the founding director of the Israel Women’s Network. The network lobbies the government to reform Israeli laws treating women differently in the military, marriage, employment and for health care.

In her memoir, Dr. Shalvi wrote with pride about her Pelech students — “my girls,” she called them — who had gone on to become judges, doctors, university lecturers, curators and business executives. “They are bearing out my contention,” she wrote, “that no area in life should be closed to you just because you are female.”

Russell Sherman, a music educator and a pianist admired for his poetic interpretations of Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and others, died on Sept. 30 at his home in Lexington, MA. He was 93.

Mr. Sherman began giving public concerts in the 1970s, performing with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra as well as major European orchestras. His concerts drew devoted fans who admired his dramatic interpretations.

Eva Kollisch, who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria when she was a teenager to become a professor and memoirist who broke new ground in feminist studies, died on Oct. 10 in Manhattan. She was 98.

The author of two memoirs, Ms. Kollisch taught for 30 years at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, where with Gerda Lerner, Joan Kelly and Sherry Ortner, she helped introduce a foundational women’s studies curriculum.

Raised in a prosperous, secular Jewish family outside Vienna, she recalled facing antisemitism from the age of 6. At times, she said, she was beaten up and called a “dirty Jew.”

When she was 13 and the Nazis annexed Austria, she could no longer continue her education with other Austrian girls and was sent to a boarding school in Vienna for Jewish girls.

In 1939, her parents placed her and her brothers on a Kindertransport train, part of the rescue operation that took about 10,000 Jewish children out of occupied Europe to safety in the Netherlands and England in the months before WWII erupted that September. She was one of the lucky ones who reunited with her parents in New York in 1940.

In an oral history interview in 2004, Ms. Kollisch said that while she remained committed to her fundamental progressive principles, she had to confront additional challenges. “I am a feminist, I am a Marxist, but I am also very worried about the whole world and humanity, and where humanity is.”