Rosalie McKenna, 84; Photographed Noted Literary Figures

Rosalie Thorne “Rollie” McKenna, 84, a photographer of Dylan Thomas and other literary lions, died June 14 in Northampton, Mass., of unspecified causes.

Born in Houston, reared in Mississippi and educated at Vassar, McKenna was working as a researcher for Time and Life magazines when she bought her first camera during a trip to Paris to escape a failing marriage. Her first portrait of a writer was of Truman Capote, whom she photographed in Florence, Italy, in 1950.

McKenna befriended Thomas, the Welsh poet, in the early 1950s and made a film about him, “The Days of Dylan Thomas.” In 1982, she published the book “Portrait of Dylan: A Photographer’s Memoir.”

Other literary subjects for her camera included W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. McKenna published her autobiography, “A Life in Photography,” in 1991.