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Mr. Corry responded with a 6,000-word article in the Arts and Leisure section of The Times defending Mr. Kosinski. Mr. Corry contended that the allegations of plagiarism and of other nefarious activities were the product of a 15-year disinformation campaign by Polish Communist intelligence operatives, resulting from the novelist’s denunciations of the Polish authorities for crushing the Solidarity movement.
Partisan literary voices lined up on both sides of the dispute, which widened into allegations that powerful journalists had exerted influence in the polemics, and the matter was never resolved. Mr. Kosinski committed suicide in 1991.
Mr. Corry became The Times’s television critic in the 1980s. He liked PBS documentaries on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and on terrorism, but he panned network news. “CBS did not understand news and confused it with entertainment,” he said in his memoir. “NBC and ABC were doing that too. News increasingly was being recited or acted out by on-air Kens and Barbies.”
John Corry was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 6, 1933, to John Joseph and Agnes (Thune) Corry, Irish Episcopalians whose forebears had changed the surname from Curry to stress their Protestant origins. His father was a bank clerk. The boy grew up in the Bay Ridge section and attended P.S. 127 and Fort Hamilton High School, graduating in 1950.
He graduated in 1954 from Hope College, a small liberal arts school in Holland, Mich. After two years in the Army, he was hired by The Times as a copy boy in 1957.
In 1960, Mr. Corry married Irmtraut Wolff, who was known as Irmie. They had two children, Colette and Janet, and were divorced in the 1970s. His second marriage, in 1982 to Sonia Landau, a Republican Party official, also ended in divorce. In 1996, he married Jean Herskovits, a professor of Nigerian history and politics, who had an adopted daughter, Fatima Nduka-Eze. His third wife died in 2019.
Besides Ms. Dahlberg, he is survived by his other daughter, Janet Farnsworth; Ms. Nduka-Eze; and six grandchildren.
