Born in Newark, NJ, and raised by a Jersey City bar owner, Nick Tosches would begin his writing career in the '60s and '70s as part of that holy triumvirate of rock critics, including Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, who seem to be accused of creating the trade. (The three in fact, worked together at Creem magazine.) Bangs died in 1982 and went on to posthumous fame as the ultimate rock critic personality (no doubt bolstered by his appearance as a character in the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's love letter to rock journalism, and Jim DeRogatis' hyper-reverent Bangs biography, Let It Blurt). Meltzer became a cultish iconoclast. However, Tosches broke out of rock to become a serious writer -- an unfulfilled aspiration of both Bangs and Meltzer (who has published novels, but is still primarily known as a rock writer). Among other things, Tosches has penned the acclaimed biographies The Devil and Sonny Liston, Dino, Power on Earth, and Hellfire, and has become a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. The Nick Tosches Reader collects 30 years of his writings, only a portion of which is rock criticism. ~ Erik Hage, Rovi