Michael Herr Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Michael Herr

From the first review to the most recent assessment, critics have lavished praise on Dispatches (1977), Michael Herr's book about the Vietnam War. Major literary scholars of that war are unanimous in their judgments that this "rock 'n' roll' work of literary journalism is perhaps the single most powerful book to come out of that war, and the book is almost universally considered a landmark. Dust jacket blurbs rarely reflect a scholarly consensus, but they do in the case of Dispatches. Gloria Emerson claimed that Herr surpassed Stephen Crane in writing about war. Tom Wolfe still maintains that Dispatches rivals Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front. Hunter S. Thompson says that Herr's book "puts all the rest of us in the shade." Robert Stone says, "I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, any war, that any writer has ever accomplished." Finally, John Le Carre calls it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." All this near hyperbole is for a writer whose previous experiences were limited to working on the literary magazine at Syracuse University (where he dropped out), a nonpaying film-criticism job at the New Leader, from which he was fired after a year for liking all the wrong movies, and a job writing travel pieces for Holiday, which he quit after a short time.

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