Evan Wright, the National Magazine Award-winning journalist and longtime Rolling Stone contributor whose reporting on the Iraq War served as the basis for the book and television series Generation Kill, has died at the age of 59. Wright’s wife confirmed his death to Rolling Stone. The cause of death was suicide.
As a writer for Rolling Stone, Wright journeyed to war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, delivering harrowing first-person reporting from the battlefields. Wright’s series of articles on Iraq — where he was embedded with a U.S. Marine Corps. battalion — was serialized for a series of Rolling Stone articles titled “The Killer Elite,” which earned him a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 2004.
That same year, Wright expanded on his “Killer Elite” reporting for his book Generation Kill, which was later adapted into an HBO miniseries by The Wire creator David Simon in 2008; Wright served as a writer on the miniseries alongside Simon and Ed Burns, and was portrayed in the show by actor Lee Tergesen.
“We’ve lost a fine journalist and storyteller. Evan’s contributions to the scripting and filming of Generation Kill were elemental,” David Simon wrote via social media on Sunday. “He was charming, funny and not a little bit feral, as many reporters are. So many moments writing in Baltimore and on set in Africa to remember.”
“I knew Evan as a good and gentle guy in a place that was neither good nor gentle,” Lt. Nathan Fick, who was featured prominently in The Killer Elite, wrote in a statement. “He wasn’t a Marine, but many of us who spent March and April 2003 alongside him have thought of Evan for the past two decades as one of us. Rest in peace, brother.”
In 2002, Rolling Stone published Wright’s true crime article “Mad Dogs & Lawyers,” a story that weaved together murder, illegal dog breeding, and the California penal system. The article was later included in the following year’s edition of The Best American Crime Writing for true crime.
During Wright’s time at Rolling Stone, he also penned features on Shakira, Quentin Tarantino, and female boxer Lucia Rijker, investigated the secret life of sorority girls at Ohio State University, reported from the anarchist underground, and detailed the little-known circumstances behind Jimi Hendrix’s mob kidnapping; the latter was an excerpt from the book American Desperado, which Wright co-wrote with drug trafficker Jon Roberts.
In addition to his time at Rolling Stone, Wright also contributed articles to Time and Vanity Fair, as well as an early career stint at Hustler, where he was that magazine’s main pornographic film reviewer. His books also include 2009’s Hella Nation and 2012’s How to Get Away With Murder in America. Most recently, Wright was featured in the HBO docuseries Teen Torture Inc., where he revisited the Seed juvenile delinquent center he was sent to in his youth; that experience was also captured in Wright’s book The Seed: A Memoir.
