Grover Lewis; Magazine Writer

Grover Lewis, one of the original writers and associate editors at Rolling Stone when that magazine began its storied rise to success, died Sunday of lung cancer.

His wife, Rae, said her husband was 60 and died in their Santa Monica home after a months-long struggle.

At his death, Lewis was working on an autobiography for the publishing house of HarperCollins. It was a narrative of his background as the grandson of poor Texas tenant farmers and the son of a truck driver.

After graduating from Texas Tech University, Lewis worked for newspapers in Ft. Worth and Houston before moving to New York, where he became one of the young radicals writing for the Village Voice.

With Hunter Thompson and Joe Eszterhas, he then became part of the irreverent staff at Rolling Stone, writing some highly praised profiles of motion picture stars and the film industry.

His anthology, “Academy All the Way,” was a collection of those pieces and involved such disparate subjects as Paul Newman and “Splendor in the Short Grass,” an article he wrote after visiting the set of “The Last Picture Show.”

In 1958, he won the Samuel French Playwriting Award for “Wait for Morning Child,” while a 1979 article, “Buried Alive in Hype,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award. His “I’ll Be There in the Morning If I Live” was a collection of poetry.

Besides his wife, he is survived by a son and daughter from a previous marriage. Services will be private.