A short life of the author
Nick Tosches (1949–2019) was born on 17 October 1949 in Newark, New Jersey. He did not attend college. He worked as a journalist for Creem, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Esquire. He died on 20 October 2019 in New York.
Life and Career
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982) — a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis that reads like a novel possessed by demons — established his method: he wrote about American popular culture with the prose style of a fallen angel and the research ethic of a detective.
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992) — about Dean Martin — is widely considered the finest celebrity biography ever written. It captures Martin as a man who cultivated his own mystery, a figure of studied indifference whose nonchalance was both a philosophy and a mask. The book also anatomises the Italian-American experience, the Mafia’s relationship with entertainment, and the machinery of mid-century American celebrity.
Where Dead Voices Gather (2001) — about Emmett Miller, an obscure 1920s blackface minstrel singer — was a meditation on racism, lost culture, and the impossibility of recovering the past. The Devil and Sonny Liston (2000) was about the boxer and his connections to organised crime. King of the Jews (2005) was about Arnold Rothstein.
His novels — Cut Numbers (1988) and In the Hand of Dante (2002) — brought the same voice to fiction.
Key Works
- Dino (1992)
- The Devil and Sonny Liston (2000)
- Hellfire (1982)
Collecting Tosches
Dino (1992, Doubleday) brings $20–$60. Hellfire (1982, Delacorte) — his scarcer debut book — brings $30–$80.