Josh Greenfeld died on May 11, 2018.PATTY WILLIAMS/The New York Times News Service
Josh Greenfeld, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who was also acclaimed for three forthright books about his autistic son, died on May 11 in Los Angeles. He was 90.
His oldest son, writer Karl Taro Greenfeld, said the cause was pneumonia.
In the early 1970s, when people with developmental disabilities were still often hidden away, Mr. Greenfeld helped put their needs in the public arena with A Boy Called Noah, published in 1972. It detailed in journal form the challenges his family faced in raising his younger son, Noah, who, born in 1966, was nonverbal and difficult to control.
The book was blunt and honest. “What’s the matter with Noah?” he wrote. “For the longest time it seemed to depend on what diagnosis we were willing to shop around for. We’ve been told he was mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, autistic, schizophrenic, possibly brain-damaged, or he was suffering from a Chinese box combination of these conditions.
“But we finally discovered the diagnosis didn’t seem to matter; it was all so sadly academic.”
Two years after the book came out, Mr. Greenfeld shared an Oscar nomination with Paul Mazursky for the screenplay of Harry and Tonto, a movie about a road trip taken by a man and his cat. (Art Carney, as Harry, won the best-actor Oscar.) He was not, however, done with the story of Noah; two more books would follow: A Place for Noah (1978) and A Client Called Noah (1987).
At a time when the United States was beginning to face the issues of how to view people with disabilities and what services to provide them, Mr. Greenfeld’s books helped other families in the same situation realize they could and should become their own best advocates.
“My father never regretted writing about our family,” his son Karl said by e-mail. “He believed it was important that parents of developmentally disabled children talk about them openly and honestly, so that society would understand how difficult raising such children can be. When he was looking for books on the subject, he found very few resources, and so wrote the book himself.”
Joshua Joseph Greenfeld was born on Feb. 27, 1928, in Malden, Mass., to Nathan and Katherine (Hellerman) Greenfeld. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan. He later received a master’s degree in English at Columbia University. In 1959, he met the Japanese writer and painter Foumiko Kometani at the MacDowell Colony for artists in New Hampshire; they married the next year. Ms. Kometani would also write about life with Noah, receiving top literary awards in Japan, including the Akutagawa Prize in 1986.
Mr. Greenfeld wrote reviews and feature articles and was also a playwright. His I Have a Dream, compiled from the writings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., ran for 88 performances on Broadway in 1976, starring Billy Dee Williams.
Karl, who continued telling Noah’s story in his own book, Boy Alone: A Brother’s Memoir (2009), said his brother, now 51, is in an assisted living home in Lawndale, Calif. “My parents went to see him every weekend until my father’s condition deteriorated over the last three years,” he said.
In addition to his wife and two sons, Mr. Greenfeld leaves two grandchildren.