'Greening of America' author Charles Reich dead at 91

Charles Reich, the author and Ivy League academic whose “The Greening of America” blessed the counterculture of the 1960s and became a million-selling manifesto for a new and euphoric way of life, has died.

Reich’s nephew Daniel Reich said he died Saturday after being briefly hospitalized. Charles Reich, a longtime resident of Sam Francisco, was 91.

Reich was a popular Yale University professor and respected legal scholar when a 39,000-word excerpt from “The Greening of America” ran in The New Yorker in September 1970, generating a massive volume of letters. The book was published a few weeks later and sold more than 2 million copies despite scorn from both conservatives and liberals.