He reported on the highs and lows of culture in the pages of Vanity Fair and elsewhere. He also wrote seven books of nonfiction and two novels.
Jesse Kornbluth, whose sly chronicles of cultural excess, celebrity and author profiles, personal essays and investigative work enlivened the pages of a newsstand’s worth of magazines during the medium’s last golden age, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 79.
His brother, Richard Kornbluth, said the cause of his death, in an assisted living facility, was Lewy body dementia.
Mr. Kornbluth “rocketed out of Harvard,” as his fellow journalist Marie Brenner put it in an interview, as a published author in 1968. During his senior year, he had compiled “Notes From the New Underground,” an anthology of articles from the era’s counterculture newspapers. The book included samplings from the short-lived Boston broadsheet The Avatar, where he had worked for a time and for which he had spent a night in jail after being arrested for selling copies on the street. After graduation, he lived for a few months at a commune called the Farm in Montague, Vt., before realizing that commune life was not for him.
“He was not a manual labor type of person,” said Tom Fels, one of the commune’s members, recalling Mr. Kornbluth’s unhappy attempts to chop wood for the Farm’s stove.
“Jesse’s ultimate view of things was that we were all losers,” said Mr. Fels, whose 2008 memoir, “Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond,” included a chapter on Mr. Kornbluth, “and he wanted to go to New York and win.”