Maxine Clair, Writer Who Came to Her Craft in Middle Age, Dies at 86

Maxine Clair, who managed a feat that many a middle-aged pencil-pusher can only dream of — namely, leaving her office job behind to become an acclaimed poet and novelist — died on Sept. 5 in Washington. She was 86.

Her daughter, Adrienne Clair, said she died during a brief stay in a hospital.

Ms. Clair was a 55-year-old hospital administrator in Washington when she published her first work of fiction, “Rattlebone” (1994), a collection of linked stories centered on a Black girl named Irene growing up in 1950s Kansas City, Kan., Ms. Clair’s hometown.

Published by the prestigious firm Farrar, Straus & Giroux, it received universal praise for Ms. Clair’s steady, unshowy narrative style, as well as her ability to evoke an entire world around a single young character.

“There is much to admire in Maxine Clair’s ‘Rattlebone,’” Charles Larson wrote in The Chicago Tribune. “Above all, one celebrates the quiet assurance of her talent.”

The book drew comparisons with other, similarly structured works, like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919). It also recalled works, like Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place” (1982), about life in segregated communities — Rattlebone is a fictionalized African American neighborhood — that focused as much on the humanity of their inhabitants as on the pity of the people’s circumstances.

“When I wrote ‘Rattlebone,’” Ms. Clair told the writer W. Ralph Eubanks in a 2023 interview for The Sewanee Review, “the driving idea was to tell the story of a Black girl coming of age — somewhat naïve in ways and wise in others — who was just a real person trying to become an adult.”

Getting “Rattlebone” published was the culmination of years of frustration and transformation.

Ms. Clair had arrived in Washington in 1967 with a degree in medical technology, and by 1980 she was the chief medical technologist at what is now Children’s National Hospital.

It was a solid middle-class job, but it left her unfulfilled. That year she used her income tax refund to take a long vacation in the Caribbean, where she dug deep into her own malaise in search of a new direction.

“I visualized, although they didn’t call it that then,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1994. “I was reading some way-out books that I won’t even mention. Essentially I was programming myself to understand I could do something else, and I could have a different life. When I came back it was very clear: I was going to be a writer.”

She submitted some poems to a writing workshop and was accepted. The teacher, seeing her potential, suggested that she apply to the master’s program in creative writing at American University.

Ms. Clair was raising four children on her own, and she couldn’t afford to leave her job. American arranged a teaching assistantship for her, and she kept her hospital position part time.

She received her M.F.A. in 1984 and published her first book, a collection of poems called “Coping With Gravity,” in 1988.

Like her later prose work, the poems in “Coping With Gravity” revel in the everyday wonders of the American Midwest — as in this passage, from “Rosedale, Kansas”:

Mirages hovered above undulant highways
and summer stomped his dusty feet, conjured up sunflowers
that ran wildly through fields of cornsilk.
Giant brown faces with yellow rays
stampeded to pavement edge
and stood cooling their feet in the clay.

Maxine Deloris Smith was born on Feb. 18, 1939, in Kansas City, Kan. Her father, Robert, worked in construction, and her mother, Lucy (Smart) Smith, raised Maxine and her eight siblings and later worked for the Hallmark greeting card company. Neither of her parents graduated from high school.

Maxine was a promising student with a dream of going into medicine. But her high school mentors told her that being a Black woman made such an aspiration unrealistic, and in college, at the University of Kansas, she studied medical technology instead. She graduated in 1962.

Her first marriage, to the future National Basketball Association all-star Bill Bridges, ended in divorce. She married Joseph Clair in 1963 and moved with him to Washington when he was accepted to Howard University School of Law. They divorced in 1978.

Along with her daughter, Ms. Clair is survived by her sons, Steven Bridges, Michael Clair and Joe Clair; her brothers, Steve and Ronald Smith; her sisters, Gloria Smith, Elinor McGinnis, Donna Smith, Joyce Smith and Linda Smith; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

After “Rattlebone” was published, Ms. Clair became a tenured professor of creative writing at George Washington University. Her other books include a novel, “October Suite” (2001), and a book about creativity, “Imagine This: Creating the Work You Love” (2014).

“Rattlebone” eventually fell out of print. But in 2022 McNally Editions, a small publisher, rereleased it.

“Maxine Clair’s coming-of-age novel in stories,” Mr. Eubanks wrote in The Sewanee Review, “is one of those books that deserves to be brought out of the shadows of African American literature and back into the spotlight it so rightly deserves.”