One of New Orleans’ greatest contemporary writers, Ronnie Virgets, has reportedly died.

According to NOLA.com, the 77-year-old died at Destrehan, Louisiana’s Ormond Nursing Home on Monday, May 20.  The news was confirmed by his partner, Lynne Jensen, though a cause of death was not released.

A native of New Orleans’ 3rd Ward born Ronald Edward Patrick Virgets, Ronnie was an award-winning writer fluent in a broad range of topics, but is perhaps best known for his work on racehorses. In fact, as John Pope writes in his detailed obituary, “Mr. Virgets was inducted into the Fair Grounds Press Box Hall of Fame, and he won two Eclipse Awards, which are national honors from the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, The Daily Racing Form and the National Turf Writers and Broadcasters.”

Virgets also wrote about the wonders of New Orleans for OffBeat, including a 1999 piece about the Lakefront. In that, he beautifully wrote, “Once upon a time, there was a city by a lake…And the people of the city would come to the lake to play and think and pray, which are the most important things to do, and sometimes very hard for people in cities to do…The health of the eye demands a horizon, wrote Emerson, and we are never tired so long as we can see far enough. The lake called Pontchartrain provided the needed horizon, the place for the people called Orleanians to see far enough. Consider the lake at storm-time. The waves, white as catfish bone, stir, swell and swoop, the water heaving in. The gulls, somehow, sitting puffed and unmoving, one at the top of each piling. The trees, all their branches wind-blasted shoreward, catch the spray and wait for the calm that always comes. Like the city itself, almost beautiful, almost threatening…”

OffBeat sends its condolences to the Virgets family and urges readers to pick up a copy of Ronnie’s Saints and Lesser Souls : The New Orleans Views of Ronnie Virgets.