War correspondent, author and screen writer Michael Herr died last week at age 76. Between 1967 and 1969, Herr served was a correspondent for Esquire magazine in the Vietnam War. In 1977, he published Dispatches, a vivid, visceral account of his wartime experience that was among the first works to bring Vietnam's horrors home to American audiences. Herr was a contributor to Apocalypse Now and co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket alongside Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford. After Kubrick's death in 1999, Herr wrote two Vanity Fair articles about the director, which later became the biography Kubrick (2000). He also wrote a fictionalized biography of newsman Walter Winchell, Walter Winchell: A Novel (1990).
Dispatches was an immediate sensation. John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time," and it got a glowing review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Herr's literary, subjective work of New Journalism remains among the great pieces of Vietnam War reportage. In 2011, the Guardian placed Dispatches its list of 100 greatest nonfiction books. Dispatches was last republished in 2009 by Everyman's Library ($24, 9780307270801). --Tobias Mutter
