Michael Herr was best known for his collection of essays from and about the Vietnam War. Dispatches has been described as “one of the greatest nonfiction works of its time” (Stone xiii). What follows will give a sense of why this work was so significant.
Works
As Herr writes:
I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything …
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Citation: Bartley, Aryn. "Michael Herr". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 May 2011; last revised 19 June 2022. [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12899, accessed 22 November 2024.]
