Journalist Michael Kelly has been killed in Iraq in a Humvee accident that also took the life of an American soldier.

Mr. Kelly was editor-at-large of the Atlantic Monthly and columnist for the Washington Post, and one of the best. His is a tragic loss to American journalism.

His last column was filed as he accompanied the 3rd Infantry across the Euphrates River. Archives of his past writings are online at the Post and the Atlantic.

He lived in Swampscott, Mass., with his wife and two sons, ages six and three.

The death of Michael Kelly is a sin against the order of the world, writes Peggy Noonan.

He was a young man on his way to becoming a great man. He was going to be one of the great editors of his time, and at the age of 46 he was already one of its great journalists. And one's first thought about him, after saying the obvious--that he wrote like a dream, that he was a great reporter with great eyes, that he was a keen judge of what is news and what should be news--is this. He was an independent man. He had an indignant independence that was beauty to behold. He knew what he thought and why, and he announced it in his columns and essays with wit and anger...

I knew him as most people did, through what he wrote. I'd met him and admired him easily, but the Michael I read I loved. And so today, without a particular right to, I feel heartbroken. When the news broke, Mencken biographer Terry Teachout expressed with concision what I felt and had not been able to articulate: "This is horrible, horrible news -- [Michael] had evolved into a great force for journalistic good, not just as regards this war but in general, and his death will leave a black hole in the sky."

More tributes: The Corner * Andrew Sullivan * Atlantic Monthly * Byron York * Michael Ledeen * Richard Brookhiser

A poem by Rudyard Kipling cited by Andrew Stuttaford:

"Have You News of My Boy Jack"

"Have you news of my boy Jack?"
Not this tide.
"When d'you think that he'll come back?"
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
"Has any one else had word of him?"
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind -
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide.