In Passing

Strafford, Vt.

W. Sloane Coffin, clergyman, activist

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a former Yale University chaplain known for his peace activism during the Vietnam War and his continuing work for social justice, died Wednesday at his home in rural Vermont. He was 81.

Coffin had been suffering from congestive heart failure and had been under the care of a hospice.

Coffin was immortalized in the “Doonesbury” comic strip when its creator, fellow Yale graduate Garry Trudeau, blended his character with that of a Trudeau roommate, who became a priest, dubbing the fictitious character “Rev. Sloan.”

Coffin gained prominence in the 1960s as an outspoken advocate for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He joined a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders and was arrested several times at demonstrations against segregation. He became a leader of the group Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, which engaged in civil disobedience including offering sanctuary in churches and synagogues to draft resisters.

He continued his activism after leaving Yale in 1976 and moving on to become minister of the Riverside Church in New York City. There he broadened his agenda to working on issues of peace, nuclear disarmament, poverty, homelessness and protecting the environment.

Florence, Italy

Muriel Spark, British novelist

Dame Muriel Spark, whose spare and humorous novels made her one of the most admired British writers of the postwar years, has died. She was 88.

Spark died Thursday in a hospital in Florence, said Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor of the Tuscan village of Civitella della Chiana, where Spark had lived for almost three decades.

Spark wrote more than 20 novels, including “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” which was later adapted for a Broadway hit and a movie.

Spark had lived in Italy since the late 1960s. But she retained the accent of her birth and youth in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended James Gillespie’s High School for Girls and was taught by the prototype for her most famous character – Miss Jean Brodie.

While that 1961 book made her famous internationally, she already had written seven novels, three volumes of poetry and respected biographical and critical work about the Bronte family, Mary Shelley and John Masefield.

Palo Alto, Calif.

William Woo, editor, teacher

William Woo, who became the first Asian American editor of a major metropolitan newspaper in the United States when he was named editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the mid-1980s, has died. He was 69.

Woo, a visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University for the past decade and the interim director of the university’s graduate journalism program, died Wednesday from complications of cancer at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., said Stanford officials.

Woo had been editor of the Post-Dispatch’s editorial page for 13 years when he was named editor in 1986. The job had previously been held by three Joseph Pulitzers – the paper’s legendary founder, who established the annual Pulitzer Prize in journalism, his son and his grandson.

Woo himself was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times during his 34 years at the Post-Dispatch – for national reporting in 1971, for foreign reporting in 1977 and for commentary in 1991.

In 1996, after being forced out of his job when the Pulitzer Publishing Co. decided on a course of change that included a shuffling of newsroom leadership, Woo became the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor of Professional Journalism at Stanford.