Nick Tosches, a music journalist known for his in-depth biographies of Dean Martin, Sonny Liston, and Jerry Lee Lewis, among many other famous figures, died Sunday at the age of 69. Tosches came up in the gonzo age of journalism, characterized by subjectivity and a freewheeling approach that Tosches embraced. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, he wrote reviews and profiles for many publications, including Rolling Stone, Fusion, and Creem. In 1996, he became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Tosches also wrote several works of fiction, publishing his first novel Cut Numbers in1988, and the acclaimed In the Hand of Dante in 2002. During a 2006 interview about his Jerry Lee Lewis biography Hellfire, Tosches was asked about his choice to end the book with Lewis “still roaming the earth, but pretty much facing the abyss.” Tosches replied: “It’s the way we all live. Shallow life, shallow ditch. Big life, big abyss.”
