Evan Wright, the National Magazine Award-winning journalist and longtime Rolling Stone contributor, has died at the age of 59. His wife confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, stating that the cause was suicide.
Wright was renowned for his harrowing first-person reporting from war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq. His series of articles on Iraq, where he was embedded with a U.S. Marine Corps battalion, was serialized in Rolling Stone as "The Killer Elite," earning him a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 2004.
Wright expanded this reporting into the 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 by actor Lee Tergesen.
In 2002, Wright's true crime article "Mad Dogs & Lawyers," which intertwined murder, illegal dog breeding, and the California penal system, was published in Rolling Stone and later included in *The Best American Crime Writing* for true crime.
During his tenure at Rolling Stone, Wright also wrote 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 Jimi Hendrix’s mob kidnapping in an excerpt from the book *American Desperado*, which he co-wrote with drug trafficker Jon Roberts.
Wright also contributed articles to Time and Vanity Fair and had an early career stint at Hustler, where he was the magazine’s main pornographic film reviewer. His books include *Hella Nation* (2009) and *How to Get Away With Murder in America* (2012).
Most recently, Wright appeared in the HBO docuseries *Teen Torture Inc.*, revisiting the Seed juvenile delinquent center he was sent to in his youth, an experience also detailed in his book *The Seed: A Memoir*.
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