Michael Herr, Syracuse native who chronicled Vietnam War, dies at 76

Syracuse native Michael Herr, left, author of the Vietnam War book ‘Dispatches,’ died June 23.

SYRACUSE, NY — Michael Herr, who grew up in Syracuse before rising to fame as one of the most acclaimed writers about the war in Vietnam, died last week at age 76.

Herr died June 23 at a hospital near his home in Delhi, Delaware County, his daughter, Claudia Herr, told The New York Times.

Herr is best known as the author of the 1977 book “Dispatches,” a personal account of the 18 months he spent as a correspondent in Vietnam in the late 1960s. The book mixes autobiography, journalism and fiction with a prose style influenced by drugs and rock ‘n roll. It became a hallmark of the writing known as “New Journalism.”

The British spy novelist John le Carre called “Dispatches” “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time,” words that appeared as the “blurb” on the book’s cover.

New York Times book critic John Leonard wrote of the book: “It is as if Dante had gone to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix and a pocketful of pills: our first rock-and-roll war, stoned murder.”

Herr later wrote a book about Kubrick, and in 1990, a novel about 1930s and 1940s-era gossip columnist Walter Winchell.

Herr was born in Lexington, Ky., but moved with his family to Syracuse when he was an infant. His father, Donald, ran a jewelry store in Syracuse, and died in 1982. His mother, Muriel, later lived in a high-rise on James Street and died in 2009.

He grew up on Crawford Avenue in Syracuse and attended Nottingham High School, where he was a classmate of another famous writer, John Berendt, best known as the author of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

He attended Syracuse University, where he worked the literary magazine edited by novelist Joyce Carol Oates. He dropped out without graduating.