How to write a life

Or, lessons from the obituaries of Knopf's Sonny Mehta

Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Knopf, the most prestigious imprint in the Penguin Random House universe, chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and arguably the most important literary publisher in the English language, died of complications of pneumonia last week at 77. Obituaries followed.

Obituaries, says Oxford, are notices of deaths ofte…