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Jerry Hopkins (author)

Jerry Hopkins
Born (1935-11-08) November 8, 1935 (age 81)
United States
Occupation Author, journalist
Nationality American
Website
jerryhopkins.com

Elisha Gerald (Jerry) Hopkins (born 1935) is an American journalist and author best known for writing the first biographies of both Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison of the Doors, as well as serving for 20 years as a correspondent and contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine. He also penned several other biographies, wrote history and humor, and was a writer-producer for Mike Wallace, Steve Allen and Mort Sahl.

To date, Hopkins has published 36 books and an estimated one thousand magazine articles. Many of his books have been translated into 16 languages and total sales exceed 6 million.

Hopkins was born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Haddonfield, a town founded by Quakers. His parents operated a dry cleaning store.

He attended a Quaker school through 6th grade and public schools through 12th, earning a BA in journalism from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia (1957) and following a short period as a reporter for the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem, NC, and brief service in the US Army, a MS in journalism from Columbia University in New York (1959).

Early career - After freelancing articles to the then-young Village Voice while at Columbia, he worked as a reporter for the Times-Picayune and as news editor of WWL Radio in New Orleans (1959-1961). He joined Mike Wallace as a writer-producer in New York for one year (1961–62) then moved to Los Angeles where he was a talent coordinator and writer-producer for Steve Allen (1962-1964). He also wrote and produced television programs for Mort Sahl, ABC-TV and Universal Studios (1964-1966; 1971). He wrote his first books during this period, an as-told-to autobiography of a health faddist, Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat (1965), and an astrological spoof, You Were Born on a Rotten Day (1969).

Middle career - From the mid-1960s, when he left television to open the first “headshop” in Los Angeles and the third in the nation (1965) [Newsweek citation] and then wrote for Rolling Stone as Los Angeles correspondent (1967-1969), he wrote features and columns for alternative newspapers, including the popular "Making It" column for the Los Angeles Free Press. He MC’ed the first love-ins in Los Angeles, edited a collection of material from the underground press, The Hippie Papers (1968) and wrote a history of rock and roll, The Rock Story (1970).

Leaving Rolling Stone temporarily in 1969 to write Elvis: A Biography (1971), it was while then serving as the magazine’s London correspondent (1972) he began researching his Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. It was rejected by more than 30 publishers before publication in 1980, when it topped the New York Times bestseller chart and was credited by many with helping kick-start the Doors’ revival as well as inspiring a new publishing genre, the rock biography. A sequel to the Elvis biography, Elvis: The Final Years (1981) followed, along with biographies of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Yoko Ono, and Raquel Welch, the latter of which was authorized but not published.


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