Diana O'Hehir

Diana Farnham O'Hehir (May 23, 1922 – January 19, 2021) was a poet and writer of prose from northern California.

She was born in Lexington in 1922, though she moved to California with her father the next year.

She first married her first husband, Mel Fiske, a writer and progressive who she met in Washington D.C. while organizing for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1946, and they had one son together.

In 1956, she was remarried, to Brendan O'Hehir, with whom she had another son, and she lived with O'Hehir until they divorced in 1986.

She taught from 1961 to 1992 at Mills College in Oakland where she was Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Professor Emerita of American Literature.

She was married three times, twice to the same man, who she remarried 35 years after their divorce, after her marriage to her second husband, and their later divorce.

She outlived both husbands, and died at the age of 98 in 2021, having published five novels and five collections of poetry.

Shortly after this, she reconnected with Fiske, as recounted in a 1999 essay in salon.com.

However, they eventually divorced, as the politics of the McCarthy era made O'Hehir wish to move away from their leftist political stances, while Fiske was committed to this political cause, as she recounted to the Marin Independent Journal in 2005 in an article about her most recent books.

O'Hehir and Fiske lived together until Fiske's death, in 2008.

Though not the most prolific, her works have been highly regarded by critics, with several receiving awards.