Nick Tosches Biography

Writer, born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Jersey City and New York by wolves from the other side. Through nepotism he became a barroom porter at the age of fourteen. Casting this career to the wind in his quest for creative fulfillment, he became a paste-up artist for the Lovable Underwear Company in New York City. On January 12, 1972, he went to lunch and never came back, drifting south to Florida, where, among other things he worked as a snake-hunter for the Miami Serpentarium. After being bit on the shin one morning, he decided to forsake all further employment, and thus became a writer of poetry and prose.

Fragments of his early years have been recounted in Stranded, edited by Greil Marcus (New York: Knopf, 1979; reissued by Da Capo, 1996) and Rear View (New York: Delilah, 1981).

It was through the American rock-’n’-roll magazines that Tosches’s nonfiction and poetry first found their way into print: Fusion, Rolling Stone, Creem, and others. An abiding love for the underbelly of American culture served as the basis for his first book, Country (1977). In his Rolling Stone review of Country, Greil Marcus wrote: “Tosches has produced a superbly detailed assault on everything country music honors as most holy, and a loving, scabrous portrait of those things in country music that are kept quiet, or ignoredin other words, on what is most holy.”

Hellfire (1982) was a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis steeped in William Faulkner, the Old Testament, and the dark and poetic style, born of the ancient classics and of the gutter, high and low, brutal and tender, that was becoming Tosches’s own. Hellfire was hailed as “quite simply the best rock & roll biography ever written” (Rolling Stone), “a work of art” (The Boston Globe), “brilliant” (The New Statesman), “definitive” (Time), “terrific” (The Washington Post), “fascinating” (The New York Times Book Review), “disturbing and important” (The Toronto Sun), and “a testament to the power of Tosches’s writing” (The Arizona Republic). Greil Marcus, in a review that would later become part of his Dead Elvis (New York: Doubleday, 1991), wrote that, “sooner or later, Hellfire will be recognized as an American classic.”

His decision to forsake employment notwithstanding, Tosches found himself working as a bartender and at other odd labors through many spells of fate in the years 1982-88.The final volume of Tosches’s rock-’n’-roll trilogy was Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (1984), a collection of wild and brazen tributes that the Times Literary Supplement found to be “telling socio-anthropology” and that led Michael Herr, the author of Dispatches, to proclaim that “Nick Tosches is about the best writer on rock 'n' roll there is, or ever has been.”