Music journalist, biographer, poet and novelist Nick Tosches died October 20 at age 69. His eclectic career began as a 19-year-old with an article published in Fusion magazine. He went on to write for Creem and Rolling Stone and was the reviews editor for Country Music magazine. Tosches is often cited alongside Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer as writers whose work on rock and roll elevated the field of music journalism. Later, he was a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and appeared in Esquire and Open City. In 1977, Tosches published his first book, Country: The Biggest Music in America. He followed that up with Hellfire (1982), a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, and Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll: The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years Before Elvis (1984).
In 1986, Tosches turned to non-musician biographies with Power on Earth, which chronicles the life of Michele Sindona, an Italian Mafia-linked murderer, banker and member of a secret neofascist Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due. Tosches also profiled Dean Martin in Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992) and Sonny Liston in The Devil and Sonny Liston (2000). He turned to fiction with the novels Cut Numbers (1988), In the Hand of Dante (2002) and Under Tiberius (2015), among others. In 2000, Da Capo Press published a collection of his journalism titled The Nick Tosches Reader ($24, 9780306809699). --Tobias Mutter
