Author Bebe Moore Campbell, who wrote compelling pieces of non-fiction and novels that pointedly addressed social and racial issues, died shortly after midnight on Monday at her California home from complications from brain cancer, according to her publicist. Campbell was 56.

“My wife was a phenomenal woman who did it her way,” her husband, Ellis Gordon, Jr., said in a statement. “She loved her family and her career as a writer. We enjoyed life together as a team, and we will miss her immensely and will love her forever.”
 
Campbell started her career as a journalist, writing for the New York Times Magazine, Black Enterprise, Essence, Ebony, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times.

Her latest book, “72 Hour Hold,” was the story of a woman in a love triangle whose life is shattered when her child develops a mental illness. She joins forces with another woman whose daughter is also unstable, and together, they take up with radical mental health workers in a search of healing for their children.

The novel was inspired, at least in part, by the struggles of a family member diagnosed with bipolar disorder and the problems navigating the mental health system. The book’s title comes from the 72-hour limit on the length of time someone can be held in a psychiatric facility against his will if he meets the criteria of being dangerous to himself, to others or gravely disabled.

Also among her works were novels, “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine,” “Singing in the Comeback Choir,” and a memoir, “Sweet Summer, Growing Up With and Without My Dad.”

“If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be remembered as the most important African-American novelist of this century -- except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin,” author Carolyn See wrote about Campbell in a book review for The Washington Post’s Book World section. “Her writing is clean and clear, her emotions run hot, but her most important characteristic is uncompromising intelligence coupled with a perfectionist’s eye for detail.”

See, who became friends with Campbell when their children attended the same high school, told BlackAmericaWeb.com that Campbell was unafraid to take on controversial topics, whether it was interracial dating, in “Brothers and Sisters,” or relationship issues in “Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage.”

“If she found a problem, she’d find a way to solve it,” See said. She said that in her Post review, she described Campbell as “an African-American Edith Wharton” and, subsequently, took a lot of heat from some black leaders who bristled at the comparison to a white novelist of a different era.

However, See said, like Wharton, Campbell “took that same incredible talent for writing a novel of manners and applied it to an apocalyptic Los Angeles.” Authors who show that kind of fearlessness, See added, “are few and far between.”

Book World deputy editor Jabari Asim told BlackAmericaWeb.com that while Campbell was probably best known for her fiction, it was her non-fiction that first caught his eye.

“I remember when I was coming up reading her work in Essence, the New York Times Sunday magazine and being very inspired,” Asim said. “I thought she was very smart and was good, somehow, at making her intelligence accessible to the reader. She didn’t dumb down her writing. In her fiction, she was a very constructive critic of society.”

To see Campbell, one would not get an immediate sense of her power. She was a tiny woman with a quiet voice. At an appearance at Penn State University in 2005, she spoke so quietly at a small session for writers that her audience had to lean in to hear her. She actually looked fragile.

She was anything but.

“She was just as strong as they come and so driven and so rigorous to the point of being austere … and funny,” See said.

“I always admired that she had a strong sense of herself,” said author Patrice Gaines, a BlackAmericaWeb.com contributor who had been friends with Campbell since the early 1980s. “Even as a friend, I knew her struggles and where she thought she needed to improve, but she was a tough mama.

“She was determined she was going to learn the business side of the industry, not just the craft. She was good at marketing herself, and she was going to be heard, whether it was by editors, publishers or whoever," Gaines said. "She knew what she wanted and had enough confidence and belief in herself and the Divine Spirit. And it would lead her, and she would be fine if she just let her wishes be known.”

Gaines told BlackAmericaWeb.com she last saw Campbell on Sept. 23 at Bebe’s Noontime Jam, an event in Los Angeles honoring Campbell, who watched the event from a wheelchair.

“The funny thing I will remember is that during the event, they were showing a video of photos of her life, and there was music to it, and (when there was) music, she loved to dance,” Gaines said. “And I went over to her to take her a pillow to put under her head to make her more comfortable, and when I got there, she threw her arms out to the side and started moving, dancing in the wheelchair to the rhythm and the beat, and I just stopped and danced with her.”

Gaines said that Campbell’s friends who organized the event were thrilled to be able to pull it off and to celebrate Campbell while she was alive to see it, but also were apprehensive about the physical toll the celebration might take on her.

“I don’t know I would have ever thought to dance, and the fact that she said, ‘Hey-ay’ and she was popping those fingers and was very happy made me feel good," Gaines told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “That’s why it was called Bebe’s Noontime Jam because of the fact that Bebe loved to dance. Some our happiest times were dancing at someone’s house or going out to dance,” particularly to the music of James Brown.

Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell Gordon was born Feb. 18, 1950 in Philadelphia to Doris Moore and the late George L.P. Moore. She attended Girls High School and went on to earn a B.S. in elementary education in 1971 from the University of Pittsburgh.

Campbell taught elementary school in Atlanta from 1972 to 1975 and was bitten by the writing bug when she took a course from author Toni Cade Bambara. Campbell soon left teaching to pursue a career in writing.

She received numerous awards throughout her career, including a National Association of Negro Business and Professional Literature Award in 1978, a 1994 NAACP Image Award for literature, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant in 1980 and the University of Pittsburgh’s Distinguished Alumni Award. She was also named an Alumni Trustee of the University in June 2005.

Campbell, a very private person, according to her friends, was in no hurry to share the news of her illness. She intended to beat it and return to work. Indeed, she continued to work as long as she could. In September, her latest children’s book, “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” was released. Early next year, another children’s book, “I’m So Hungry,” will be released.

After her diagnosis became public, Campbell posted letters on her Web site thanking friends and supporters for their cards, gifts and words of inspiration.

“I am trying to live my best life now and hope that you can do the same, as well. For me, that means having peace of mind and faith in God,” she wrote in May.

See said writing about the mental health system took a lot out of Campbell and that after "72 Hour Hold" was published, “I think she drastically realigned her life. As she got older, she was stunned by the unfairness of life,” said See, who added that her grandson was diagnosed with autism about the same time that Campbell’s family member was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that they talked about “there was not enough treatment, and nobody knows what they’re doing.”

She said Campbell considered herself a problem-solver and used her writing to effect change. “She was trying to carry the world’s problems on her shoulders,” See said. “But there are some problems you just can’t solve. That struck her very hard.”

But Campbell’s passion, strength and generous spirit was the constant theme on Monday as people learned of her passing.

“I did a nice profile on Bebe what seems like 100 years ago when I was at the St. Pete Times,” in St. Petersburg, Fla., Sabrina Miller, a freelance writer based in Chicago, said in a posting on the National Association of Black Journalists’ listserve. “Her novel ‘Your Blues Ain't Like Mine’ had just been released and she was appearing at the Times' Festival of Reading.

”She was incredibly gracious, funny, smart. She loved the profile and actually signed a copy of it for me, as well as the book. We had a lot of fun hanging out in St. Pete. I didn't have the opportunity to encounter her often after that but when I did, she always remembered me. I was a big fan of her writing and am so sorry to hear about her passing,” Miller said.

“Bebe was always a gracious interview,” Shauna Rhone, web editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., said. “The last time I interviewed her was for “Comeback Choir,’ and she complimented me for having read her book before the interview. I was like, that's not normal? She said no, some folks cold-called her and had little to no idea of the breadth of her work.”

And her work was paramount, Gaines said.

“I think she really did want to be remembered for her work. It was important to her. She was dedicated to being a writer; she was committed to it, particularly that black stories be told or told from a black perspective,” Gaines said. “She believed that was a big reason why she was here on this earth. She would like for her to be read for years and studied.”

In a 1998 review for The Washington Post, Patricia Elam noted that in Campbell’s novel, “Brothers and Sisters,” Campbell so skillfully navigated issues of race that it was being used as a textbook for several college race-relation courses.

“‘Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine’ by Bebe Moore Campbell continues to be one of the seminal works of contemporary African American literature,” Manie Barron, a literary agent with The Menza-Barron Agency, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
 
“‘Your Blues,’ a novel based on the Emmett Till lynching, allowed Ms. Campbell to show us the greatest skill a writer can possess -- which is to humanize the face of even the most monstrous characters.”

Yanick Rice Lamb, managing editor of Heart & Soul magazine and a journalism professor at Howard University, said with Campbell’s death, “it’s heart-rending to lose so many journalists in a matter of weeks,” noting the deaths of CBS’ Ed Bradley, Phyl Garland, a former reporter for the black press and a highly regarded professor at Columbia Journalism School in New York, and former New York Times Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

“Bebe was a talented writer who moved smoothly between fiction and nonfiction,” Lamb told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “What I admired most was that she was a giving, down-to-earth person who never let success go to her head. She was fiercely loyal to her family, supportive of her community and encouraging to other writers. I thought she did an excellent job sharing the realities of book publishing during panel discussions at NABJ conventions.”

“You just don’t find Renaissance people anymore, and she was a Renaissance woman,” the "Tom Joyner Morning Show's"  Sybil Wilkes told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Her effective advocacy, her gifted work ... she was so passionate about what she did.”

Wilkes said she was especially impressed by Campbell’s work in bringing attention to “mental health care for African-Americans. She really opened the door to so much discussion about mental illness.”

Campbell had appeared on the "Morning Show" since its first year, according to Wilkes, “and I’ve been a fan since the first book I read of hers. She was one of those extremely gifted writers, and she was as gifted as a human being.”

Campbell's viewing will be held Saturday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., followed by the funeral service at First A.M.E. Church, 2270 South Harvard Boulevard, in Los Angeles. In lieu of flowers, her family asked that donations be sent to her favorite charities: National Alliance for the Mentally Ill - Urban Los Angeles and the United Negro College Fund.

It was Campbell’s zest for life, Wilkes said, that made her particularly special.

“She," Wilkes said of her fallen friend, "was a ballsy broad.”