From Poets & Writers, May/June 2004

What Happened to the Revolution?
The Legacy of New Journalism

By Michael Depp

A good revolution usually needs three things to ignite, and by the time the flag of New Journalism flew up in the 1960s, it had all the matches. First, it required an Old Guard to burn in effigy, and fiction, with its tyrannical hold on the literary canon, was marked for the flames. Second ingredient: a populace simmering, simmering and ready to boil. Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Lib, Nixon – the stove was on.

The last crucial thing a revolution needs is having a few charismatic leaders in the mix to galvanize it all and set an example with some style. Enter over-the-top Truman Capote, swaggering Norman Mailer and, most importantly, Tom Wolfe, New Journalism’s Che Guevara in spats and a smirk. The cannons were roaring, and the battle for a big, cushy chair at the canon’s table was on.

Of course, many revolutions don’t really get their names until after the smoke has cleared, and so it wasn’t until the publication of Wolfe’s anthology, The New Journalism, in 1973, that its title (bandied about from the late 1960s on) was crystallized and its apparent accomplishments enumerated – “causing a panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American letters in half a century,” Wolfe wrote in his manifesto-like introductory essay to the book.

Hyperbolic as he was, the facts seemed to bear him out. Capote’s self-described “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood (1965) had captivated the nation and dominated the best seller lists, and Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner’s Song (1979) followed suit. Two of fiction’s biggest guns had made the leap to non-fiction and taken a nation of reality-rapt readers with them.

The magazine market, once the popular stronghold of the short story, ceded more of its coveted pages to works of literary journalism under the stewardship of editors like Harold Hayes at Esquire (who took over the magazine in 1961) and Willie Morris at Harper’s (who brought the magazine “kicking and screaming into the present” in 1967, according to writer David Halberstam), while regional magazines like New York and Texas Monthly created additional venues. Then there were the bright lights who were suddenly taking the form a giant leap forward – Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, George Plimpton and Hunter S. Thompson among them.

Publishers saw dollar signs. Careers were being made. Wolfe, Mailer and Capote did the talk show circuit on a steadily rolling charm offensive while fiction writers retreated and cowered.

So what happened?

Capote went back to fiction, and aside from the occasional foray to the other side, Mailer joined him. Wolfe wiped his hands clean of book-length non-fiction with the publication of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and never looked back. The novel seemed to regain its stride and came back swinging by the mid to late1970s both commercially (to wit, the ouevre and era of Stephen King and other uber-bestsellers) and critically (Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon among a rising group of iconoclasts in the form). Most scholars put their noses back into volumes of fiction and poetry, the whole messy distraction over and done, they thought with relief.

Some 30 years later, though, New Journalism’s inheritance has hardly been spent. While not the self-identifying, self-aggrandizing cause it was in the 60s and 70s, literary journalism has found a quieter but no less assured place among its practitioners. For the small minority of scholars who champion it, the struggle for its legitimacy as a form continues. But there, too, is hope. The legacy of New Journalism persists, even if its fathers seem to have turned their backs on it.

Though even that isn’t entirely true. “Journalism is based on a modern mythology,” says Norman Mailer, reflecting on his role in the movement. “It assumes that facts are reliable, and independent of nuance. What New Journalism brought to the table was the contrary notion that the mood of an event might reveal more of what was going on than the formal historical record of what was said and done. So the concept of New Journalism – I must say we were doing it before we had a name for it! – did prove an open sesame to novelists like myself. We knew that mood was tasty as good grub – the real meat and potatoes of the moment. Of course, you could be wrong in your interpretation of the mood, but then, where was the journalist who was not often skewed in his facts?”

It would also be wrong to suggest that New Journalism was a phenomenon in a vacuum rather than the apex of a literary journalism trajectory going back to Stephen Crane, Daniel Dafoe or even Marco Polo, if you want to be slightly more generous in its definition. And plotted on this longer course, the form tends to be cyclical, according to John Hartsock, a professor of communications studies at SUNY Cortland whose book, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst), identifies three major cycles in this country’s literary history.

In the 1890s through the early 1900s, a serious economic depression and mass immigration to the U.S. prompted the first real explosion of the form. The 1930s comprised the second big wave with the Great Depression and the Progressive Movement as catalyzing forces. Then came the 60s and the Vietnam War, both Kennedy and the King assassinations and the Civil Rights Movement, and literary journalism was back with a bullet.

So what’s the common denominator? “It’s precisely at those times that people want explanations that conventional mainstream journalism – the objectified model – is simply too inadequate for trying to capture what’s going on,” Hartsock says, echoing Mailer. “This kind of writing has been engaged in more when there was considerable cultural and social uncertainty.”

More than just politically tumultuous, the 60s ushered in an era of tremendous social change says Norman Sims, chair of the journalism department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and editor of two anthologies of literary journalism. “This was a form of journalism that was essentially breaking out from a fairly repressive era of post-war American life represented by the 50s and early 60s – a lot of conformity, a lot of anti-communism, a fear of being different,” he says.

There were other factors unique to the 1960s. Mass circulation magazines like Harper’s and Esquire opened up a space under new editorial direction to reach a wide swath of readers. And as John J. Pauly, a communications professor at St. Louis University tracks it, the burgeoning landscape of regional and city magazines throughout the mid to late 60s as well as alternative newsweeklies all over the country (most relatively low budget and so prone to experiment) provided further venues for New Journalism to reach readers. “There actually comes to be a taste for public affairs,” Pauly says. “There’s a serious readership for stories about the war, civil rights and cultural change, and it becomes marketable.”

And that’s a very, very important thing for New Journalism. Pauly says the movement, which was only vaguely beginning to think of itself as such, staked out an educated, middle class audience that was hungry for pieces which captured the tone and excitement of the 60s. Following behind them, publishers caught on to the phenomenon, and then the writers caught on to the publishers. The quickly learned lesson for writers: Cut your teeth with a few good magazine pieces that take an effective, non-traditional track to a non-traditional subject and there was some serious money to be made, not to mention fame. Exhibit A: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1967) by Tom Wolfe. Exhibit B: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson. And so on.

With the mid 1970s finding the nation on a somewhat more even keel, literary journalism didn’t exactly disappear. Sims says what followed was natural – a second and third generation of writers absorbed the major upheavals of voice and form that were unprecedented with New Journalism. These newer generations took certain concepts that were radical at the time – the fact that non-fiction had access to all of the devices fiction used save making stuff up, for instance – for granted. They moved on.

“Those were the guys who broke the mold,” says Erik Larson, author of the National Book Award finalist The Devil in the White City and one of the nation’s leading non-fiction writers. Jennifer Egan, a National Book Award finalist who divides her work between fiction and literary reporting for The New York Times Magazine, says things are quieter now, but it’s O.K. “I think there’s always that dialectic between a quantum leap and then refining the distance covered by that leap, and it may be that we’re still in that refining period,” she says.

Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief (1998) and a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, agrees. “After a while it just becomes standard or the form itself isn’t as exciting,” she says. “The content becomes important, and sometimes you end up having better work at that point because you winnow out the pretenders and people who are attracted to a form just because it’s new.”

But while writers adjusted and refined their prose to the sea change in the form, other shifts in the landscape were afoot. By the mid to late 70s, many of the mass circulation magazines that had given New Journalism a forum, including Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post, retrenched and became less adventurous in their story selection in the face of growing competition from consumer and special interest magazines. City magazines and alternative weeklies, too, became more conservative and consumer-oriented.

Then another, stranger thing happened. Many readers experienced a kind of relapse vis-à-vis their view of non-fiction’s possibilities: It’s a good, engaging narrative, it’s got dialogue, scene construction and the exploration of global themes, so… it’s got to be fiction, right?

Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm (1997), has seen this often on book tours. “That you can use the same techniques as fiction writers hadn’t really occurred to the average reader,” he says. “At least the ones I spoke to were really surprised to be enjoying non-fiction.”

Orlean has dealt with this phenomenon, too. “I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand, yet it’s a constant source of confusion and curiosity,” she says. “I find it really funny. I very often will have The Orchid Thief referred to as a novel, and it drives me crazy.”

Scholars, for their part, have yielded cautious respect. Journals on the form like Points of Entry (published at Christopher Newport University) have emerged, and there’s now even a literary journalism major at the University of California at Irvine. But many scholars still look down their noses at it, Sims says. “They consider it a lesser form.”

Of course, the nomenclature around it hasn’t exactly helped things. Sure New Journalism had a rebel yell, a daring, look-out-here-we-come! ring to it, but flash forward 30 years and no one’s really buying the “new” part anymore. And while English professors still heave a collective sigh at the very mention of the word “journalism,” substitutions have proved clunky and vague at best.

“Creative non-fiction” usually takes memoirs and essays under its umbrella. “Literary non-fiction” raises hackles – why get stuck defining a thing against its opposite? And “literary journalism”? Well, as Mark Kramer, in his introduction to the anthology of that name he co-edited with Sims, says, “As a practitioner, I find the ‘literary’ part self-congratulating and the ‘journalism’ part masking the form’s inventiveness.” But, as he and many others have resigned themselves for the moment, it’ll have to do.

And yet, against confused readers, sniffing scholars and tangled terminology, one very significant thing still managed to happen anyway: People went out and bought ambitious, narrative-driven non-fiction books like crazy. To wit: The Perfect Storm, A Civil Action (1995), The Orchid Thief, Seabiscuit (2001). And to each of those, that most assured, 21st century validation of success – a film adaptation.

“I feel like in the last five or ten years we’ve seen a real blossoming of it,” Orlean says. “If you peel away those mega-fiction books, I suspect quality non-fiction books sell a lot more than quality fiction, even books that are critically praised.”

Publishers, of course, love this. “Editors and publishers are much more interested in long, narrative non-fiction books because they’ve seen books like The Perfect Storm make a lot of money,” Sims says, “so they’re much more willing to publish book-length literary journalism than they were in the 1960s.”

The form certainly made a believer out of Charlie Conrad, an executive editor at Doubleday, especially when he acquired a little-known or cared-about manuscript by Jon Krakaeur called Into the Wild (1996) and saw it skyrocket up the best seller lists.

“Story-driven non-fiction is extraordinarily successful and there’s a huge market for it now,” Conrad says with a ready explanation for publishers’ embrace of the form. “I think it’s partly because when you’re publishing a non-fiction book, especially one that’s story-driven as opposed to didactic or scholarly, you can target the market in an easier way.”

How many novels can allay risk like that? Any volumes of poetry come to mind? Short story collections, anyone?

All of which brings things back around to Wolfe and his essay, “The New Journalism,” which at the time of its publication was less a rallying cry than a fait accompli for the form. With the incendiary, button-pushing language Wolfe reveled in, he goaded the literary lions of the moment – Barth, Updike, Roth, Bellow (“Damn it all, Saul, the Huns have arrived…”) – with the ultimate taunt from the journalism camp, looking over its shoulder at the damage wrought: “They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.”

Well, maybe not. “(Wolfe) was responding to really vicious attacks on him, and he was doing it in kind,” Sims says of the essay’s context. “He was going to cut back as hard as they had cut him, and he knew how to do it, which is to say that your precious form of literature was going to become irrelevant.”

Needless to say the novel hasn’t exactly slipped over the literary horizon line these days, but then again, it has lost a large part of one important beachhead: the marketplace. Witness non-fiction’s dominance of the magazine market while short stories hang on the fringes. And take it from the perspective of income, too, Sims suggests: How many writers of non-fiction need some kind of institutional subsidy to make a living versus, say, novelists or poets?

But there are other ways to mark a legacy, and contemporary practitioners of literary journalism aren’t exactly counting up their royalty checks and laughing at their fiction-writing brethren. While non-fiction personalities these days tend to run to the more retiring types than their chest-pounding forebears, they proceed confident in the longevity of the form in which they work.

“Overall, the tide is flowing in the right direction because people recognize it’s O.K. to take a non-fiction subject and, without breaking the rules, make that subject come alive,” Larson says.

So maybe the inheritance works out something like this: New Journalism + Time – Flamboyance = Good Essential Storytelling (The Non-Fiction Kind). As Orlean says, “The desire for storytelling and for those stories to be true and to tell them in a full and eloquent way – that’s going to continue and keep growing and changing for the better. And I think the audience is going to remain there and really grow.”