British journalist and travel writer John Wilcock, who "played a major role in the emergence of the alternative press at the Village Voice, the East Village Other and the Underground Press Syndicate, died September 13, the New York Times reported. He was 91. In the 1960s and early '70s, Wilcock was also the author of many "$5 a day" travel books. A 1973 Times profile described him as "an influential man nobody knows," an "oracle of the nitty-gritty of inexpensive, traditional tourism" and "an apostle and chronicler of the radical underground."
Wilcock met Arthur Frommer in 1960 and soon began working for him, writing guidebooks "on how to live on $5 a day in Mexico, Greece, Japan, India and elsewhere. He later edited books on the occult and published Other Scenes, an underground magazine offering travel tips, poetry and social commentary," the Times noted.
A regular at Andy Warhol's Factory in Manhattan, Wilcock founded Interview magazine with Warhol in 1969 and in 1971 published The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, a collection of interviews with the artist's friends and associates. A revised edition was released in 2010, the same year Wilcock published his autobiography, Manhattan Memories. In 2016, Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall published John Wilcock: New York Years, 1954-1971, the first volume of a biography in graphic-novel form. A second volume is in the works and is being serialized on Boing Boing.