Peter Straub, whose literary novels of terror, mystery and the supernatural placed him in the top ranks of the horror-fiction boom of the 1970s and ‘80s, died September 4 in Manhattan. He was 79.

Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it, the New York Times said. Novels like Julia (1975) and Ghost Story (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.

Nevertheless, he won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that previously had been sidelined as sub-literary, The Times said.

“I wanted to take the genre and pull it upstairs a little bit,” he told The Times in 1979. “Not exactly transcend the genre, but make a little more of the material than has been made of it in the recent past.

Of the horror label, he told Publishers Weekly in 2016, “I like its acknowledgment that life is a dodgy and uncertain business, and a monster with a smiling face may live or work right next door to you.”

William Klein, a photographer who captured the energy as well as the glamour of New York, died Sept. 10, in Paris. He was 96.

Mr. Klein was one of his generation’s most celebrated photographers, represented in museums across Europe and the United States. Mr. Klein began his career as a restless postwar American in Paris, who took a studio on the Left Bank, defied traditions and plunged into his anarchic visions of painting, sculpture, street and fashion photography, feature films and documentaries

He painted whirling murals and sculptured shapes that moved. His photos looked like accidents. He overexposed negatives, bleached out contrasts, and posed subjects to fake illusions of spontaneity. “Klein broke half the rules of photography and ignored the other half,” Jim Lewis wrote in Slate magazine in 2003.

For more than 20 years, Howard Slusher was an enemy of National Football League and National Basketball Association owners, who found his relentless, aggressive style difficult to abide. He was known as “Agent Orange” for his tough tactics on negotiating players’ contracts as well as his red hair. Mr. Slusher, who went on to a second career as a consultant for Nike, died on July 13 at a hospital in Portland, OR. He was 85.

“I have never in my life not negotiated,” Mr. Slusher told Mike Lupica of The Daily News. “I sit and negotiate. I don’t sit and wait.”

In 1978 — long before players made tens of millions of dollars a year — Mr. Slusher laid out the fundamental tension between players and teams. “The owners like the kids but don’t respect them,” he told The Miami News. “The kids don’t like the owners, but they’re in awe of them. They wonder, ‘How did they get to where they could have so much power over my life?’ The kids resent him, but still respect him. Besides, they are worried they could get shuffled off to Buffalo.”

Steven Hoffenberg, a brash New York debt mogul who spend 18 years in federal prison after admitting to running a fraud scheme that prosecutors said was then among the largest such crimes in U.S. history, was found dead on August 23 in the modest apartment in Derby, CT, where he had lived for about two years. He was 77.

Mr. Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995 to conspiracy and fraud charges arising from a Ponzi scheme tied to his main company, Towers Financial Corporation, which was primarily a collection firm that bought debt from businesses like hospitals, nursing homes, and phone companies.

Prosecutors said that Towers sold more than $460 million in fraudulent notes and bonds to investors, and used some of the money to pay interest owed to earlier investors. The rest went to propping up a fiscal house of cards that relied on inflated revenue and phony profits to make Towers look like a major healthcare financing firm. In his guilty plea, Mr. Hoffenberg, who once had a corporate jet, a limousine, a yacht, a Long Island estate, and a Manhattan apartment admitted to being the scheme’s mastermind. After leaving prison, he sought to blame someone else: his onetime business associate Jeffrey Epstein, who was later charged with the sexual abuse of young women and girls.

Kurt Gottfried, as theoretical physicist who barely escaped the brutal reality of one war and devoted his career to preventing another as a co-founder of the influential Union of Concerned Scientists, died on August 25, in Ithaca, NY. He was 93.

Dr. Gottfried, who fled Nazi-controlled Austria when he was 9, became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weaponry, a champion of politically dissident scientists in the Soviet Union and South America, and a critic of the George W. Bush administration’s environmental policy, which he said was grounded in research skewed to comport with the White House’s political agenda.

Dr. Gottfried and the physicist Henry Way Kendall, as future Nobel laureate, founded the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969. A nonpartisan organization, it lobbies to shift the nation’s research priorities from military technology to “the solution of pressing environmental and social problems.”

He rallied fellow scientists in the early 1980s to help derail the Reagan Administration’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, the ambitious missile defense system that became mocked as a “Star Wars” shield. They argued that the initiative wo8ld be technologically futile, and that pursuit of space-based weapons amounted to an abandonment of the policy of mutually assured destruction, which until then had prevented nuclear conflict.

Dr. Gottfried was hired as an associate professor at Cornell in 1964, and was considered a mentor to a generation of prominent scientists and government officials. He was named a professor emeritus in 1998. He also served on the senior staff of the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

Marc Lewitinn, who spend 850 days on a ventilator, struggling with long COVID, died of a heart attack on July 23 at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, NJ. He was 76.

Mr. Lewitinn was an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. He raised money for Ethiopian Jews fleeing their country as refugees, and won praise from the Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Charles Kremer for helping to persuade the U.S. government to deport Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a Romanian; cleric and fascist collaborator who had moved to the United States after WWII.

In 1995, Mr. Lewitinn sued the Egyptian government to win the release of several Torah scrolls, prayer books and other religious items seized from the country’s Jewish community in the late 1950s.

Earl J. Silbert, who led the federal prosecution of the botched Watergate burglary, which secured the convictions of all five burglars and two of the break-in’s planners, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, died on Sept. 6 in Keene, NH. He was 86.

The break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington on June 17, 1972, set off a chain of events that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon two years later.

Mr. Silbert later became a respected white collar defense lawyer, notably described as a “lawyer’s lawyer.” He was the go-to person when a lawyer got into trouble. His clients included former Attorney General Griffin Bell, when he was accused of defaming an E.F. Hutton branch manager in an investigative report on a checking scandal; former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles during the independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton; and Kenneth Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of the bankrupt energy firm Enron.