Journalist with a chaotic, creative career in the underground press, who was in at the launch of New York’s Village VoiceIn 1954, soon after he arrived in New York City as a jobbing Yorkshire-born journalist, John Wilcock put up a notice in a Greenwich Village bookshop. It invited people interested in setting up a paper for the Village to get in touch. A meeting was held – and nothing, initially, ensued. But a year later, in a bar, Wilcock ran into Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher, two of those who had attended the meeting. Fancher by now had money to put into a launch, and so, soon afterwards, did a friend of a girlfriend of Wolf, the novelist Norman Mailer – described by Wilcock as a “definite pain in the ass”.On 26 October 1955, the first issue of the Village Voice – its title suggested by Mailer – was published. It was a time of cold war conformity and paranoia, but New York was not America, and anyway, within the city the Village was a bohemian outpost. It was where, Wilcock wrote, “all the artists and writers were”; he called the artists “wonder workers”. The Voice, while not itself desperately radical, would reflect this vibrant culture. The paper also heralded the journalism that would erupt in the 1960s across the west known as the “underground press”. Its spirit infused later fanzines and radical papers. The Voice itself continued publishing in print until last year, and online until a few weeks ago. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2018-09-14 00:00:00 UTC ]