Our friend and colleague Carl Bromley, the editorial director of Nation Books, wrote to us yesterday with the news that John Ross had died Monday the 17^th. He was 72. The activist journalist, poet, and novelist, described in Tim Redmond‘s San Francisco Bay Guardian eulogy as an “uncontrollable shit disturber,” had lived in Mexico City as a self-described “exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.”

Ross wrote his own epitaph, and that of the noisy and violent form of political life which he advocated, in Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 years of Life and Death on the American Left, “… a highly idiosyncratic account of industrial trade unionism, the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements, [and] government repression …”

On the book’s cover is an endorsement by Thomas Pynchon, a friend from Ross’s Humboldt County days: “A ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateways of our national narrative.”

In his July 2004 Harper’s Magazine review (subscription only), the late John Leonard described the then sixty-six-year-old author as a “Huck Finn/Holden Caulfield/Dennis the Menace/Weatherman wannabe and subversive journalist … who’s been on the losing side of every cause since the Spanish Civil War.” According to Carl, who published three of Ross’s more than twenty books, Ross loved it.

Ross began writing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1984 and is credited with being the first American to report the 1993 Zapatista rebellion, in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. After reporting on the deadly 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross made his home there, at the Hotel Isabel. In 1995, Ross won the American Book Award for Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. In 2003, he volunteered as human shield in Baghdad, protecting Iraqi civilians from attack; according to Redmond in his Bay Guardian remembrance, Ross signed  his emails, “John Ross, humanshield”

Redmond also reported Ross’s refusal, in 2009, to be honored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:

“Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the “motherfuckers” who are driving poor people out of the Mission.”

(At the Nation website John Nichols has posted Ross’s statement from 2009 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.)

In this Democracy Now! appearance from April 2010, Ross talks about life in his adopted city, the subject of his last book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City “a phantasmagoric retelling” of “4,000,000,000 years of history,” reviewed by Iain Sinclair as “Coruscating and necessary. Here is one of those rare books that convinces from the first sentence: a writer embedded in his writing, wholly present in the subject, leading us with savage grace to the heart of the beast.”

Ross is survived by his son, Dante A. Ross, a daughter, Carla Ross-Allen, and a granddaughter, Zoe Ross-Allen, as well as a stepdaughter, Dylan Melbourne and her daugther Honore, as well as a sister, Susan Gardner.

Let Redmond have the last word:

When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”

I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.”