American · 1935–2016
John Gilmore (1935-2016) was an American author, actor, and journalist known for iconoclastic Hollywood memoirs and true crime writing. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he began as a motion picture and television actor in the 1950s before turning to writing, becoming loosely associated with the Beat Generation. He was a friend of James Dean in the early 1950s and wrote two books about him: The Real James Dean (1975), which controversially discussed the pair's experimentation with homosexuality, and the expanded Live Fast-Die Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean (1997). His other work includes Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (1994) and The Garbage People (1971), an early account of the Manson Family. He taught in the writing program at Antioch University, and his papers are archived at UCLA.