![]() I won’t try to prove to you how good it is, or how important it is, how it is one of the greatest works of the second great age of literary nonfiction in The United States. I read Dispatches when I was 19 years old. Thompson’s reaction is as accurate as any: "We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived," he wrote, "but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade." The book ultimately arrived in 1977, and Hunter S. Herr served as Esquire’s Vietnam War correspondent from 1967 to 1969, and returned to the United States intending to quickly produce a book about what he’d seen there.īut 18 months after his return, he suffered a nervous breakdown and wrote nothing for five years. Today, aside perhaps from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, it is the seminal work about the war, full stop. ![]() His masterpiece, Dispatches, has been out of fashion for a while, but when it was published in 1977, it was widely regarded as the seminal work of new journalism about the Vietnam War. Michael Herr, the author of Dispatches and co-writer of Full Metal Jacket, is dead at 76. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |