It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

Michael Herr, widely regarded as the premier chronicler of the Vietnam War, died on Thursday at the age of 76.

Today’s Boston Globe includes this Associated Press obituary. Lede:

Noooo . . . not a novel, but “the seminal work of new journalism about the Vietnam War,” as Emmett Rensin wrote in Vox. It took Herr ten years to produce Dispatches, after suffering a nervous breakdown upon his return from Vietnam and not writing anything for five years.

Rensin also noted this quote by Hunter S. Thompson: “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived . . . but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade.”

The end of the AP obit notes that “[Herr’s] other books included ‘Walter Winchell,’ a 1990 novel about the powerful and irascible gossip columnist.” Actually, that is a novel, so the AP went one-for-two on the book front.

No correction attached to the Globe pickup, though. So they’re oh-for-one.