John Wilcock, Pioneer of the Underground Press, Dies at 91

But he was unable to live on the Voice’s wages — often little or nothing — and while working there he also got a paying job with The Times, where he edited and wrote travel articles from 1957 to 1959. Many were offbeat: a wry look at tourists gawking up at skyscrapers in Manhattan, a plan to resurrect a South Dakota ghost town by installing Indians.

He met Arthur Frommer, the travel book publisher, in 1960 and soon began working for him. He wrote guidebooks on how to live on $5 a day in Mexico, Greece, Japan, India and elsewhere. He later edited books on the occult and published Other Scenes, an underground magazine offering travel tips, poetry and social commentary.

He married Amber Nomi Lamann in 1967. They were divorced in 1972. No immediate family members survive.

In 1963, Mr. Wilcock, a photographer and a nude model were arrested on a Sunday afternoon at Liberty Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan on a charge of disturbing the peace. A judge acquitted them on grounds that in that location, which as part of the financial district was normally deserted on weekends, there was no one around to be disturbed, except the detective who had nabbed them.

Mr. Wilcock was for many years a regular among the artists and partygoers at Andy Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan. He founded Interview magazine with Warhol in 1969. (Interview, like The Village Voice, ceased publication this year.) In 1971 he published “The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol” — which was actually a collection of interviews with Warhol’s friends and associates, credited to “John Wilcock with a cast of thousands.”

A revised edition of the Warhol book was published in 2010, the same year Mr. Wilcox published his own autobiography, “Manhattan Memories.”

In the 1980s and ’90s Mr. Wilcock published several small newspapers, including one called John Wilcock’s Secret Diary. He also wrote historical tidbits and practical advice on travel for Insight Guides, a London publisher.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/obituaries/john-wilcock-pioneer-of-the-underground-press-dies-at-91.html?partner=rss&emc=rss