SOURCE: "The Writer's Cloudy Final Chapter," in The Washington Post, April 15, 1997, p. D1.

[In the obituary below, Streitfeld relates the shock that greeted news of Dorris's death.]

The literary world was shocked yesterday at the news that Michael Dorris, a novelist and nonfiction writer seemingly at the top of his game, had killed himself.

Dorris, 52, checked into a motel in Concord, N.H., under an assumed name. He used a plastic bag to suffocate himself, police said. His body was found on Friday but the news did not filter out to the media until late Sunday night.

A man of many talents, Dorris wrote novels for adults and children, essays, short stories and nonfiction. One of his key works is the best-selling The Broken Cord, which chronicled the crisis of an adopted child with fetal alcohol syndrome. It became a hit ABC-TV movie in 1992. His novel A Yellow...