Evan Wright, a modern-day gonzo journalist who embedded with an elite U.S. Marine battalion in Iraq for prizewinning articles that were published in Rolling Stone and grew into the book and HBO miniseries “Generation Kill,” died July 12 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.
The cause was suicide, according to his family.
Mr. Wright wrote for magazines including Time and Vanity Fair but was perhaps best known for his contributions to Rolling Stone, the literary home beginning in the 1970s of Hunter S. Thompson, the renegade writer who embodied the personal, sometimes subversive brand of reportage known as gonzo journalism.
Mr. Wright rejected the frequent comparisons between him and Thompson.
“‘Gonzo’ speaks of writing that is more about the reporter than the subject,” he wrote in a book-length collection of his articles, “Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut’s War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures With the Totally Lost Tribes of America” (2009). “With few exceptions, my intent has always been to focus on my subjects in all of their imperfect glory.”
But for better or worse, the analogy stuck. To readers interested in the affairs of the world beyond those reported in the columns of more tradition-bound publications, Mr. Wright’s byline carried the promise of a riveting, insightful, visceral read. He infiltrated a gathering of neo-Nazis in Idaho, reported from the trenches of anarchist groups and chronicled the lives of sorority girls at Ohio State University, in addition to profiling show business celebrities including Shakira and Quentin Tarantino.
Mr. Wright was most celebrated, however, as a war correspondent, embedding first with the U.S. military during the Afghan war and then, in 2003, with the Marine First Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq. His writings from Iraq, a three-part series published in Rolling Stone as “The Killer Elite,” received the 2004 National Magazine Award for reporting.
“Writer-photographer Evan Wright risked his life to get this story — a rollicking, profane, brutal look at the Marines of Bravo Company, who led the charge into Iraq last year,” read the citation. “In the course of myriad firefights, mortar shellings and ambushes, Wright won the trust of his subjects, but he remained clear-eyed, depicting the soldier’s cold-bloodedness as well as their humanity. Brilliant down to the last detail.”
Mr. Wright expanded his articles into the book “Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War,” published in 2004 and adapted in 2008 into an HBO miniseries that Mr. Wright co-wrote with David Simon and Ed Burns, both of “The Wire.” In a post on X after Mr. Wright’s death, Simon recalled him as “charming, funny and not a little bit feral, as many reporters are.”
I first met Evan Wright in 1996 when he was an editor at Larry Flynt’s porn magazines. He started publishing in Rolling Stone in 1999 and I only saw him occasionally after that.
We were always on good terms. In December of 1998, he paid me $1000 to write an essay about the Pope for a Seth Warshavsky publication. I was supposed to get paid $3000 but after I turned in my work, I settled for what I could get.
Evan Wright profiled me in the August 19, 1999 issue of Rolling Stone:
“Porn attracts a wacky element,” Luke Ford says. “Case A: Luke Ford.” Since April 1998, Ford, a thirty-three-year-old convert to Orthodox Judaism, has been writing a daily Web column covering the triple-X industry (lukeford.com). Ford exposes drug use, mob connections and murder plots, and details the operatic dramas of porn stars’ daily lives. Sometimes the column is about little more than Ford’s fascination with his own life. He posts naked pictures of himself cavorting with porn actresses, and when his stepmom sent him a letter calling him “devil possessed,” he put it on his site. (Ford’s father, a Christian evangelist, brands Luke “mentally unstable” as a result of a head injury he suffered as a teen.)
…When the leaders of the top adult video and Internet companies gathered at a secretive conference in Cancun, Mexico, in the spring, Ford was a prime topic. The owner of a chain of adult stores [Edward Wedelstedt] was reportedly heard saying not only that Ford is a “menace to society” but “no one should worry about him anymore – Luke’s going to end up as a spot on the pavement.”
Death threats notwithstanding, everybody in the adult business reads the column. The secret to his success? “People in the porn business are extremely self-involved,” says Michael Louis Albo, executive editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide. “Luke angers them, but they love reading about themselves in his column.”
The Evan Wright profile helped me to reconnect with an old friend from UCLA.
Evan wasn’t careful with his facts. I had journalist friends who despised Evan because they believed he was untrustworthy, they alleged he would paint dishonest narratives if they served him. I saw that Evan was playing a game that served Evan.
Evan’s career peaked with his publication of the book Generation Kill in 2004. Nothing he published after that had the same impact.
He was intermittently a heavy drug user.
Evan was an introvert. That we each spent so much time in the porn industry reveals our self-destructive sides. We enjoyed slumming it. In some ways, we felt more comfortable with the refuse of society rather than its best.
Smiling Arab emails me:
Thoughts on Evan Wright bro? Just saw that he died of suicide, seemingly lost amidst the vacuum suck of the last 3 days.
Supposedly he just appeared in an HBO Max doc about one of those schools that would take in “troubled” kids and beat the fuck out of them and sometimes fuck the fuck out of them too. Like I think it aired last week or something and he killed himself the next day. Shocking shit.
He was easily the one guy from your old interviews that seemed genuinely impressive. “Generation Kill” is about the only book from the Iraq War that is readable today. I have a bunch and they’re all trash. Even books about ISIS are total fucking garbage and it’s only been like 6 years since the Caliphate fell.
When I think about Evan Wright, it brings up this quote: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Chapter IV. Apophthegms and Interludes, §146).
The one piece of advice I got from Evan was to pick my enemies carefully. He thought I was reckless with the way I went after everyone in power on my blog and he urged me to be more selective with my targets.
Evan appeared to be a gonzo journalist, but ultimately he was a careerist – he put his career before every other consideration. He played the game more carefully than I did by following the dictates of those with power such as Larry Flynt, Seth Warshavsky and Rolling Stone.
