Al Aronowitz, who died Monday at 77, was a pioneering journalist who covered the Beat literary scene and engineered a meeting between Bob Dylan and the Beatles that has passed into rock ‘n’ roll legend.

An effusive exemplar of the novelistic style that became known as “new journalism,” Aronowitz was so much a part of his reportage that he claimed to have introduced the Beatles to marijuana before seeing his own career as a rock journalist at the New York Post go up in a haze of freebase-cocaine smoke.

While he was still on top of his game, Aronowitz was a leading cultural broker of the 1960s, introducing his readers to the cutting edge while introducing artists on the cutting edge to each other.

Aronowitz counted the poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and jazz trumpeter Miles Davis as friends and introduced Davis to Mick Jagger. Art Garfunkel called him “Uncle Al, the man who introduces everybody to everybody.”

He became an intimate of the Beats by traveling to San Francisco on behalf of the Post to interview Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. The paper’s editor, Paul Sann, was looking for Aronowitz to trash some “dumb-f– pansies posing as poets,” Aronowitz told the Boston Phoenix last year. Instead, his reporting turned into a 12-part series published in the 1960s that treated the Beats as a vital emerging phenomenon. Ginsberg became a long-term friend – Aronowitz referred to the poet as his “guru” – before the two broke.

After publishing a lengthy Saturday Evening Post article on the emerging Greenwich Village folk scene, Aronowitz became enamored of the young Bob Dylan, whom he described as “skinny as a scarecrow and wound up as a telephone cord.” The two became friends; later, Aronowitz briefly managed Mr. Dylan. Aronowitz claimed that Mr. Dylan composed “Mr. Tambourine Man” during a long night of repeated listenings to Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness” at Aronowitz’s home in Berkeley Heights, N.J.

Typically for his sui generis sensibility, Aronowitz even claimed to have convinced Mr. Dylan to take up the electric guitar, a minor milestone in the history of rock music.

The meeting between Mr. Dylan and the Beatles, recalled in his self-published “Bob Dylan and the Beatles” and by numerous other sources, took place at New York’s Hotel Delmonico on August 28, 1964. At the time, both acts were riding the charts. Aronowitz described their mutual admiration: “Billy the Kid and the Jesse James Gang bubbled shyly like bashful little girls.” Aronowitz said he eventually convinced the Beatles – who were not imbibers – to take a few puffs of his stash, starting with Ringo, whom John designated his “royal taster.”

As a result of both the meeting and the drugs, Aronowitz claimed, pop music was irrevocably transformed, as Mr. Dylan and the Beatles began to influence each other’s music.

“The Beatles’ magic was in their sound,” Aronowitz told the Phoenix. “Bob’s magic was in his words. After they met, the Beatles’ words got grittier, and Bob invented folk-rock.”

Aronowitz grew up in central New Jersey, the son of an Orthodox Jewish butcher. After studying journalism at Rutgers University, he worked at a series of New Jersey newspapers before landing a job at the Post, “rewriting the New York Times for the morning edition.” Soon, he had worked his way into features, including the epochal 12-part series on the Beats. In addition to writing for magazines, he co-authored with Peter Hamill the 1961 biography “Ernest Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man.”

He spent the next decade compiling an impressive array of pop music acquaintances, including Bobby Darin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Janis Joplin, all of whom he wrote about in his Pop Scene column.

Always a provider of chemical stimulants to the stars, Aronowitz’s own life began to unravel under their influence around 1972. His wife died of cancer the same year, and the Post fired him – citing conflicts of interest with his occasional management of various artists. Aronowitz, by his own account, spent more than a decade in a drug-addled haze, then pulled himself out of it cold turkey in 1985.

He began to write again, but had trouble finding anyone willing to publish his work, having alienated virtually everyone he ever knew. When one of his children introduced him to the Internet in the mid-1990s, it came as a revelation, the ultimate in self-publishing. He founded a Web site, theblacklistedjournalist.com, where he posted hundreds of stories.

“I’m just a poor, broke, forgotten and ignored blacklisted journalist who has to give away all my stories free on the Internet because I don’t want to wait to be published posthumously,” he wrote on the Web site. He became an outspoken opponent of the ingestion of smoke: “Not smoke from a cigarette, not smoke from a marijuana joint, not smoke from the exhaust of a car, not smoke from a burning match, not smoke from a smokestack, nothing! Smoke should never enter the human lung! Smoke is anti-life!”

Chastened, suffering from cancer, but also proud of his accomplishments, he plugged on doggedly, and was disappointed that his ill health in recent years limited the number of hours he could devote to writing.

As he lay dying in the hospital, lucid to the end, he requested Davis’s album “Kind of Blue.” He still regarded it as the most beautiful music ever recorded.

Davis had been a longtime friend; the two were introduced by Billie Holiday. During their first conversation, as Aronowitz told it, the two men were standing next to each other at urinals in the bathroom, during a break in a 1959 Davis performance at Birdland.

Aronowitz, busy with his research into the Beat movement, which owed so much to black jazz, asked Davis for his opinion of the Beats.

“The Beat Generation ain’t nothin’ but just more synthetic white s-!” Davis replied.

“I was collecting giants,” Aronowitz told the Phoenix. “I was collecting immortal souls. I thought some of their immortality might fall on me.”

Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz

Born May 5, 1928, in Bordentown, N.J.; died August 1 at Trinitas Hospital in Elizabeth, N.J., of cancer; survived by his children, Joel Roi Aronowitz, Brett Hillary Aronowitz, and Myles Mason Aronowitz, two grandchildren, and a longtime companion, Ida Becker.