Clancy Sigal | Prolific writer, 90

Writer Clancy Sigal, 90, who led a life overflowing with action, famous names, firings, breakups, and a vision of America born of many years as an expatriate, died of congestive heart failure July 16 in Los Angeles.

He was a street-corner communist agitator in the early 1940s, then a World War II soldier who stared down one of the chief architects of the Holocaust at a Nazi war-crimes trial.

In Hollywood, he was Humphrey Bogart's agent before being blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He was a promising novelist in the 1960s, experimented with LSD in London, and was the model for a character in one of the 20th century's most celebrated novels.

Among his novels, one (Going Away) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Since its first U.S. publication in 1962, it has become a cult favorite and has been compared favorably to Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a restless portrait of 1950s America.

He moved in 1957 to London, where he rented a room from writer Doris Lessing, who 50 years later won the Nobel Prize for literature. During their four-year affair, each of them furtively read the other's diaries and notebooks. Mr. Sigal was clearly the basis for the character of Saul Green, a handsome "American lefty" who was the lover of Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Lessing's 1962 novel The Golden Notebook.

Mr. Sigal spent 30 years in England, working as a journalist before returning to the United States in the late 1980s.

- Washington Post