Michael Herr





Michael Herr

Author profile


born
in Syracuse, New York, The United States
April 13, 1940


About this author


Writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best "to have been written about the Vietnam War" by The New York Times Book Review; novelist John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Herr later was credited with pioneering the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe.

Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket which was nominated for an Academy Award with his close friend director Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford.

Herr wrote a pair of articles for Vanity Fair...more


Average rating: 4.21 · 4,961 ratings · 383 reviews · 5 distinct works · Similar authors
Dispatches
4.23 of 5 stars 4.23 avg rating — 4,653 ratings — published 1977 — 31 editions
Kubrick
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 136 ratings — published 1995 — 5 editions
Walter Winchell: A Novel
2.9 of 5 stars 2.90 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 2009 — 6 editions
The Big Room
by
2.5 of 5 stars 2.50 avg rating — 2 ratings3 editions
The Portable Sixties Reader
by
4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 avg rating — 116 ratings — published 2002
Full metal jacket
by
3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 avg rating — 84 ratings — published 1987 — 3 editions
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“...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”
Michael Herr

“I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras… We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.”
Michael Herr, Dispatches

“How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?”
Michael Herr, Dispatches

Topics Mentioning This Author

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Reading with Style: RwS Completed Tasks 927 236 Dec 01, 2010 06:41am  
Around the World ...: Vietnam 4 78 Jul 06, 2012 03:19pm  


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