After Lou Reed died of liver disease on Oct. 27, 2013, Rolling Stone wrote that he “fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry.”

His old friend Patti Smith, writing in The New Yorker, called him “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.”

Laurie Anderson, his wife since 2008, described Reed in The East Hampton Star as “a tai chi master” who spent his last days on the South Fork “being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature.”

“Lou was a prince and a fighter,” she wrote.

On the latter point, at least, Ms. Anderson may overlap with Howard Sounes, the author of the controversial new Lou Reed biography, “Notes From the Velvet Underground: The Life of Lou Reed,” released in England last week, which paints a less-than-flattering portrait of Reed as a “monster” of a man, who used racial slurs, abused women and fought with fellow artists.