DIED. Preston Jones, 43, late-blooming playwright widely hailed in 1976 for A Texas Trilogy, his saga of life in a one-horse West Texas town; following surgery for ulcers; in Dallas. Born in Albuquerque, big, burly Jones spent the last half of his life in Texas, working as a director, ticket taker and lead actor at Paul Baker's Dallas Theater Center, where his wife Mary Sue is second in command. Almost 40 when he finished his three plays set in mythical Bradleyville, Jones was discovered by Tennessee Williams' agent, Audrey Wood, who arranged for a Washington production of Trilogy. The plays' success at the Kennedy Center led to a brief run on Broadway and national celebrity for the author, but Jones chose to continue to work quietly in Dallas, where, he said, he had "a life in the theater for which most playwrights dream."

DIED. James G. Grant, 53, an associate editor at TIME for five years; of a heart attack; in Valhalla, N. Y. A veteran of Stars and Stripes in Berlin, Army Times in London and the Newburgh (N.Y.) News, Grant joined TIME in 1969, where he specialized in business writing and helped to launch the magazine's Energy section.

DIED. Ludvik Svoboda, 83, President of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Soviet invasion; in Prague. Having fled to Poland when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Svoboda returned in 1945 as a triumphant general, alongside Red Army forces. He became Czechoslovakia's first postwar Defense Minister and secretly abetted the Communist takeover three years later. Discredited and imprisoned during the Stalinist purges of the early '50s, he was politically resurrected by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1968, the retired general was selected as a compromise presidential candidate by liberal Czech Leader Alexander Dubcek, who hoped the choice would allay Moscow's growing doubts about Dubcek's fealty. The plan failed, and Dubcek was brutally ousted later that year. Svoboda, who retained his office until 1975, managed to wrest Dubcek and other liberal officials from Soviet custody but agreed in return to support the puppet regime of Gustav Husak, his successor.

DIED. Gio Ponti, 87, innovative Italian architect, designer and founding publisher (in 1928) of Domus, a leading Italian architectural journal; of cancer; in Milan. Ponti's varied projects included a villa for the Shah of Iran, a ministry of industrial development for Iraq, and the auditorium of the Time-Life Building in Manhattan. But his best-known structure is Milan's 420-ft. wafer-thin Pirelli building, which towers higher than any other in Italy. A stalwart debunker of design cliches and a champion of functionalism, Ponti created scooper-like dinner forks, glass bookshelves in which the volumes seem to float, and an austere double bed. A bed, he said, "isn't only a place for voluptuousness," but a place for comfort and majesty.

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