Richard Goldstein's precocious career in literary journalism in the 1960s filled the underground niche of counterculture reportage and rock and roll criticism. His "Pop Eye" column in The Village Voice was credited with helping launch serious and incisive popular criticism of rock music and the counterculture of the 1960s. The "counter-reportage" he invented probed the images of what he called "pseudo events," creating "a field of his own in which to exercise his critical faculties." His controversial assessment of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in The New York Times in 1967 cost him some credibility as a rock critic; nevertheless, Ellen Sander maintained in the Saturday Review (31 July 1971) that by the end of the 1960s Goldstein had become generally recognized "not only as the most astute rock critic of his times and one of the decade's most promising young writers but as one of the most...