NEW YORK — Tony Judt, a highly praised and controversial historian who wrote with sharp persistence about the changing world at large and the tragic world within — the fatal disease that paralyzed him — died Friday at his home in New York City.
Judt, a native of London who in recent years was a professor of European studies at New York University, was 62. His death, caused by complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, was confirmed by a university spokesman.
A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006 for a nearly 900-page history of modern Europe, “Postwar,” Judt was diagnosed in 2008 with ALS, which attacks nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord and destroys the ability to move and speak.
Although confined like “a modern-day mummy,” his thinking was unimpaired, as Judt demonstrated in 2010 through a series of essays for The New York Review of Books.
“In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration,” Judt wrote in an essay titled “Night.” “(But) there is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably — as it now appears to me — by those not exclusively dependent upon them.”
Judt’s determination to tell his tale brought sympathy and admiration for a historian not known for sparing feelings.
He took on communists, free marketers, supporters of the Iraq war and Israel. The New Yorker’s Louis Menand noted that the strength of “Postwar’ was inseparable “from the personality of its author, who does not count self-effacement a literary virtue.”
In 2009, Judt received an honorary George Orwell Prize for “intelligence, insight and conspicuous courage.”
