Dennis R. Fowler ’63

Dennis died May 28, 2026, in a nursing home in Oxford, N.Y., following a stroke.  

His home was in Otego, a village in a rural area of the Mohawk Valley, where he lived for 50 years. He had a successful, lifelong career as a freelance writer with nearly 60 romance novels to his credit as well as computer trade columns and publications and a science fiction novel. 

Dennis came to the class from Mamaroneck (N.Y.) High School. An economics major, he was a member of the Sports Car Club and the freshman swim team.  

Following two years in the Army, Dennis lived in New York City, working various jobs as he churned out his first novel. It didn’t sell. In 1969, in the Princeton Chapel with Dean Gordon officiating, he married Peggy Kahoe. They escaped to upstate New York and, as he recounted for our 50th-reunion yearbook, settled “on an abandoned 100-acre dairy farm ($200/an acre with the house and barn thrown in).  

“As Peggy was about to deliver our child and I was out of work again, I foresaw a need for money,” Dennis wrote. He dashed off a 35,000-word romance novel — salacious and steamy — “which immediately sold, launching my career as a freelance writer.” Fifty more novels followed and he then switched to writing about computers for 20 years. 

Dennis and Peggy were deeply involved in their community — she in the Orpheus Theatre and Habitat for Humanity, he in the Otego Harris Library. 

Dennis was predeceased by his wife of 46 years, Peggy, in 2017. Their only child, daughter Celeste ’94, died in 2004 of metastatic melanoma. Dennis’s brother, Jerry, survives him.