Jesse Kornbluth, "whose sly chronicles of cultural excess, celebrity and author profiles, personal essays and investigative work enlivened the pages of a newsstand's worth of magazines during the medium's last golden age," died April 3, the New York Times reported. He was 79. Kornbluth also wrote several books and was a co-founder of The Book Report/BookReporter.com.
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Kornbluth debuted as a published author in 1968 with Notes from the New Underground, an anthology of articles compiled from the era's counterculture newspapers, during his senior year at Harvard. After graduation, he lived briefly at a commune called the Farm in Montague, Mass., before realizing that commune life was not for him, the Times noted.
"He was not a manual labor type of person," said Tom Fels, whose memoir Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond (2008) included a chapter on Kornbluth. "Jesse's ultimate view of things was that we were all losers, and he wanted to go to New York and win."
As a freelancer, he contributed to, among many publications, the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, and New Times. He also worked as a ghostwriter, wrote screenplays (still unproduced) and a play about Matisse.
Kornbluth wrote or co-wrote a number of nonfiction books, including Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken; Airborne: The Triumph and Struggle of Michael Jordan; Pre-Pop Warhol; and The Other Guy Blinked (with Roger Enrico). He also published two novels, Married Sex (2015) and JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story (2020)
"Jesse was the expert on everything, or could sound like one," said Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair.
Actor, filmmaker, and author Griffin Dunne recalled marveling at Kornbluth's multitasking skills: "He could hold a conversation with me while hunt-and-pecking out an article on deadline on his IBM Selectric with a huge joint in his mouth."
Kornbluth "was an early Internet pioneer, jumping in in the mid-1990s, when AOL was ascendant and most people were still baffled by the new medium. In 1996, he and Carol Fitzgerald, a former Condé Nast executive, founded the website Bookreporter.com as an online community for book lovers," the Times wrote.
In a tribute, Fitzgerald recalled when Kornbluth "learned that AOL was putting companies into business with their Greenhouse program. We presented to them a few times, and we became their book site. That is the basic backstory.... Jesse and I soldiered into a brand-new world, learning tech together (I have many funny stories about that) but, more than that, cementing a friendship that was one of the most important in my life. Jesse was curious, kind, funny and brilliant. He made my writing better; he liked 'snappy copy.' He could shape copy in a nanosecond. He had a Rolodex of contacts that included some of the sharpest and most sought-after names in the business....
"People knew him and loved him. He knew everyone's name, from the cleaning lady to the people who ran the office building, and he addressed them as such. He was a Pied Piper of sorts who collected people throughout his career and put them together whenever it would work. His knowledge was vast. I am not sure if I ever talked to him without hearing a quote from a piece of literature or a person of note."
In 2004, Kornbluth started his own website, Headbutler.com, "a cultural concierge service, as he explained it--for which he wrote about movies, plays, books and ideas, at no charge. His last post was in April 2024, when his illness took over," the Times noted.