In Memory: Jim Murphy

By Gayleen Rabakukk

Award-winning author Jim Murphy died in his Woodstock, New York home on May 1. He was 74 years old.

Shannon Maughan reported in Publishers Weekly that Jim enjoyed writing and illustrating his own comic books during his childhood, but didn’t become an avid reader until high school. When a teacher forbid the class from reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1929), Jim took it as a challenge, and set out to read “any other book I could get a hold of that I fe...