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99-612: The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism , which included works by himself, Truman Capote , Hunter S. Thompson , Norman Mailer , Joan Didion , Terry Southern , Robert Christgau , Gay Talese and others. Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly , Harper's , CoEvolution Quarterly , Esquire , New York , The New Yorker , Rolling Stone , and for

198-629: A Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the London-based Literary Review , a prize established "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel". Wolfe later explained that such sexual references were deliberately clinical. Wolfe wrote that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Charles Dickens , Émile Zola , and John Steinbeck . Wolfe announced in early 2008 that he

297-458: A distinct genre and criticism against it as a new form. Robert Stein believed that "In the New Journalism the eye of the beholder is all—or almost all," and in 1971 Philip M. Howard, wrote that the new nonfiction writers rejected objectivity in favor of a more personal, subjective reportage. This parallels much of what Wakefield said in his 1966 Atlantic article. Tom Wolfe Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018)

396-642: A "New Journalism" had been created. Ault and Emery, for instance, said "[i]ndustrialization and urbanization changed the face of America during the latter half of the Nineteenth century, and its newspapers entered an era known as that of the 'New Journalism. ' " John Hohenberg, in The Professional Journalist (1960), called the interpretive reporting which developed after World War II a "new journalism which not only seeks to explain as well as to inform; it even dares to teach, to measure, to evaluate." During

495-463: A New Journalist. In an article entitled "The Personal Voice and the Impersonal Eye", Dan Wakefield acclaimed the nonfiction of Capote and Wolfe as elevating reporting to the level of literature, terming that work and some of Norman Mailer 's nonfiction a journalistic breakthrough: reporting "charged with the energy of art". A review by Jack Newfield of Dick Schaap 's Turned On saw the book as

594-433: A collection of his articles in this style, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby , adding to his notability. He published a second collection of articles, The Pump House Gang , in 1968. Wolfe wrote on popular culture, architecture, politics, and other topics that underscored, among other things, how American life in the 1960s had been transformed by post-WWII economic prosperity. His defining work from this era

693-735: A collection of his writings from the Herald-Tribune , Esquire , and other publications. This was what Wolfe called New Journalism , in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques , mixing them with the traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed reporting. Wolfe experimented with four literary devices not normally associated with feature writing: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, multiple points of view, and detailed description of individuals' status-life symbols (the material choices people make) in writing this stylized form of journalism. He later referred to this style as literary journalism. Of

792-518: A conservative by The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , The Washington Post , National Review , and USA Today . Editor Byron Dobell labelled Wolfe a reactionary ; while a member of the Black Panther Party called him a racist, due to his portrayal of the party in Radical Chic . Wolfe rejected such labels, saying "If I have been judged to be right wing , I think this is because of

891-454: A custom car extravaganza in Los Angeles, in 1963. Finding he could not do justice to the subject in magazine article format, he wrote a letter to his editor, Byron Dobell, which grew into a 49-page report detailing the custom car world, complete with scene construction, dialogue and flamboyant description. Esquire ran the letter, striking out "Dear Byron." and it became Wolfe's maiden effort as

990-626: A daughter, Alexandra; and a son, Thomas Kennerly III. Wolfe died from an infection in Manhattan on May 14, 2018, at the age of 88. The historian Meredith Hindley credits Wolfe with introducing the terms "statusphere", "the right stuff", " radical chic ", " the Me Decade " and "good ol' boy" into the English lexicon . Wolfe was at times incorrectly credited with coining the term " trophy wife ". His term for extremely thin women in his novel The Bonfire of

1089-452: A depth of reporting and an attention to the most minute facts and details that most newspapermen, even the most experienced, have never dreamed of. In his "Birth of the New Journalism" in New York , Wolfe returned to the subject, which he here described as a depth of information never before demanded in newspaper work. The New Journalist, he said, must stay with his subject for days and weeks at

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1188-681: A forum for discussion of journalistic and social activism. In another 1971 article under the same title, Ridgeway called the counterculture magazines such as The New Republic and Ramparts and the American underground press New Journalism. Another version of subjectivism in reporting is what is sometimes called participatory reporting. Robert Stein, in Media Power , defines New Journalism as "A form of participatory reporting that evolved in parallel with participatory politics ..." The above interpretations of New Journalism view it as an attitude toward

1287-471: A good example of budding tradition in American journalism which rejected many of the constraints of conventional reporting: This new genre defines itself by claiming many of the techniques that were once the unchallenged terrain of the novelist: tension, symbol, cadence, irony, prosody, imagination. A 1968 review of Wolfe's The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test said Wolfe and Mailer were applying "the imaginative resources of fiction" to

1386-498: A modest aspirant form." Irving was perhaps the most dismissive, saying "It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine   ... read sentences and watch yourself gag." Wolfe responded, saying, "It's a tantrum. It's a wonderful tantrum. A Man in Full panicked Irving the same way it panicked Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them." He later called Updike and Mailer "two old piles of bones" and said again that Irving

1485-625: A more complex set of relationships wherein the journalist becomes an involved, more fully reactive witness, no longer distanced and detached from the people and events reported." Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is considered a striking example of New Journalism. This account of the Merry Pranksters , a famous sixties counter-culture group, was highly experimental in Wolfe's use of onomatopoeia , free association , and eccentric punctuation—such as multiple exclamation marks and italics—to convey

1584-435: A new art form which he labelled the "nonfiction novel". I've always had the theory that reportage is the great unexplored art form... I've had this theory that a factual piece of work could explore whole new dimensions in writing that would have a double effect fiction does not have—the very fact of its being true, every word of it's true, would add a double contribution of strength and impact Capote continued to stress that he

1683-541: A new installment in each biweekly issue of Rolling Stone . Later Wolfe was unhappy with his "very public first draft" and thoroughly revised his work, even changing his protagonist, Sherman McCoy. Wolfe had originally made him a writer, but recast him as a bond salesman. Wolfe researched and revised for two years, and his The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987. The book was a commercial and critical success, spending weeks on bestseller lists and earning praise from

1782-734: A number of universities in the United States and abroad, including Mexico and Israel. In the early 1970s, he taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop. His honors included the Longview Award for Literature (1960), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976) and a Fulbright grant (1985). After suffering from a number of physical setbacks, including a debilitating heart attack , Krim committed suicide in his one-room apartment on East 10th Street by an overdose of barbiturates on August 30, 1989. Phillip Lopate published Krim's "For My Brothers and Sisters in

1881-455: A panel discussion reported in Writer's Digest , merely reporting what people did and said. Wolfe identified the four main devices New Journalists borrowed from literary fiction : Despite these elements, New Journalism is not fiction. It maintains elements of reporting including strict adherence to factual accuracy and the writer being the primary source. To get "inside the head" of a character,

1980-636: A position with the New York Herald Tribune as a general assignment reporter and feature writer. The editors of the Herald Tribune , including Clay Felker of the Sunday section supplement New York magazine, encouraged their writers to break the conventions of newspaper writing. Wolfe attracted attention in 1963 when, three months before the JFK assassination , he published an article on George Ohsawa and

2079-533: A precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage ( Miami and the Siege of Chicago ) and in other nonfiction as well. Wolfe wrote that his first acquaintance with a new style of reporting came in a 1962 Esquire article about Joe Louis by Gay Talese . " 'Joe Louis at Fifty' wasn't like a magazine article at all. It was like a short story. It began with a scene, an intimate confrontation between Louis and his third wife..." Wolfe said Talese

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2178-466: A regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, achieving national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (an account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters ) and two collections of articles and essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers . In 1979, he published

2277-434: A short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly . Contemporary journalists and writers questioned the "currency" of New Journalism and its qualification as a distinct genre. The subjective nature of New Journalism received extensive exploration: one critic suggested the genre's practitioners functioned more as sociologists and psychoanalysts than as journalists. Criticism has been leveled at numerous individual writers in

2376-458: A stretch. In Wolfe's Esquire piece, saturation became the "Locker Room Genre" of intensive digging into the lives and personalities of one's subject, in contrast to the aloof and genteel tradition of the essayists and "The Literary Gentlemen in the Grandstand". For Talese, intensive reportage took the form of interior monologue to discover from his subjects what they were thinking, not, he said in

2475-570: A subjective style. Upon leaving Yale, he wrote a friend, explaining through expletives his personal opinions about his thesis. Though Wolfe was offered teaching jobs in academia, he opted to work as a reporter. In 1956, while still preparing his thesis, Wolfe became a reporter for the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts . Wolfe finished his thesis in 1957. In 1959, he was hired by The Washington Post . Wolfe has said that part of

2574-524: A tryout with the New York Giants , but was cut after three days, which he blamed on his inability to throw good fastballs. Wolfe abandoned baseball and instead followed his professor Fishwick's example, enrolling in Yale University 's American studies doctoral program. His Ph.D. thesis was titled The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929–1942. In

2673-427: A vastly adequate social satirist". Novelist Louis Auchincloss praised Wolfe, describing The Bonfire of the Vanities as "a marvelous book". Critic James Wood disparaged Wolfe's "big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability." In 2000, Wolfe

2772-434: Is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (published the same day as The Pump House Gang in 1968), which for many epitomized the 1960s. Although a conservative in many ways (in 2008, he claimed never to have used LSD and to have tried marijuana only once ), Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade. In 1970, he published two essays in book form as Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers . "Radical Chic"

2871-467: Is an artistic, creative, literary reporting form with three basic traits: dramatic literary techniques; intensive reporting; and reporting of generally acknowledged subjectivity. Pervading many of the specific interpretations of New Journalism is a posture of subjectivity. Subjectivism is thus a common element among many (though not all) of its definitions. In contrast to a conventional journalistic striving for an objectivity, subjective journalism allows for

2970-408: Is hard to isolate from a number of the more generic meanings. The new nonfiction were sometimes taken for advocacy of subjective journalism. A 1972 article by Dennis Chase defines New Journalism as a subjective journalism emphasizing "truth" over "facts" but uses major nonfiction stylists as its example. Although much of the critical literature discussed the use of literary or fictional techniques as

3069-431: Is inconsistent with objectivity or accuracy. However, others have argued that total immersion enhances accuracy. As Wolfe put the case: I am the first to agree that the New Journalism should be as accurate as traditional journalism. In fact my claims for the New Journalism, and my demands upon it, go far beyond that. I contend that it has already proven itself more accurate than traditional journalism—which unfortunately

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3168-643: Is often categorized with the writers of the Beat Generation . He wrote for the Village Voice , Playboy , New York Element and International Times , among many other publications. He worked for a time at The New Yorker , where Brendan Gill recalled he was often "stripped to the waist." Krim was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and spent much of his time in New York City . He

3267-545: Is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form. Seymour Krim 's Shake It for the World, Smartass , which appeared in 1970, contained "An Open Letter to Norman Mailer" which defined New Journalism as "a free nonfictional prose that uses every resource of the best fiction." In "The Newspaper As Literature/Literature As Leadership", he called journalism "the de facto literature" of

3366-617: Is saying but so much... Wolfe coined "saturation reporting" in his Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors article. After citing the opening paragraphs of Talese's Joe Louis piece, he confessed believing that Talese had "piped" or faked the story, only later to be convinced, after learning that Talese so deeply delved into the subject, that he could report entire scenes and dialogues. The basic units of reporting are no longer who-what-when-where-how and why but whole scenes and stretches of dialogue. The New Journalism involves

3465-503: The Iraq War . In a 2004 interview in The Guardian , he said that his "idol" in writing about society and culture is Émile Zola . Wolfe described Zola as "a man of the left", one who "went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie." Despite his mostly conservative views, Wolfe also criticized

3564-458: The muck-raking Stead, and declared that, under this editor, "the P.M.G., whatever may be its merits, is fast ceasing to be literature." Stead himself called his brand of journalism ' Government by Journalism '. How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre is not clear. Tom Wolfe , a practitioner and principal advocate of the form, wrote in at least two articles in 1972 that he had no idea of where it began. Trying to shed light on

3663-406: The sanpaku condition foretelling death. During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike , Wolfe approached Esquire magazine about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of southern California . He struggled with the article until his editor, Byron Dobell , suggested that Wolfe send him his notes so they could piece the story together. Wolfe procrastinated. The evening before

3762-424: The 1960s and 1970s, the term enjoyed widespread popularity, often with meanings bearing manifestly little or no connection with one another. Although James E. Murphy noted that "...most uses of the term seem to refer to something no more specific than vague new directions in journalism", Curtis D. MacDougal devoted the preface of the sixth edition of his Interpretative Reporting to New Journalism and cataloged many of

3861-507: The New Journalism?" wondered Thomas Powers in a 1975 issue of Commonweal . In 1981, Joe Nocera published a postmortem in Washington Monthly blaming its demise on the journalistic liberties taken by Hunter S. Thompson. Regardless of the culprit, less than a decade after Wolfe's 1973 New Journalism anthology, the consensus was that New Journalism was dead. As a literary genre, New Journalism has certain technical characteristics. It

3960-768: The Third Great Awakening . In 1979, Wolfe published The Right Stuff , an account of the pilots who became America's first astronauts . Following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy, exploits, he likened these heroes to " single combat warriors" of a bygone era, going forth to battle in the Space Race on behalf of their country. In 1983, the book was adapted into an Academy Award -winning feature film . Wolfe also wrote two critiques of and social histories of modern art and modern architecture , The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House , published in 1975 and 1981, respectively. The Painted Word mocked

4059-416: The Vanities was "social X-rays". According to journalism professor Ben Yagoda , Wolfe is also responsible for the use of the present tense in magazine profile pieces; before he began doing so in the early 1960s, profile articles had always been written in the past tense . Seymour Krim Seymour Krim (May 11, 1922 – August 30, 1989) was an American author , editor and literary critic . He

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4158-458: The basis for a New Journalism, critics also referred to the form as stemming from intensive reporting. Stein, for instance, found the key to New Journalism not its fictionlike form but the " saturation reporting" which precedes it, the result of the writer's immersion in his subject. Consequently, Stein concluded, the writer is as much part of his story as is the subject and he thus linked saturation reporting with subjectivity. For him, New Journalism

4257-551: The contemporary definitions: "Activist, advocacy, participatory, tell-it-as-you-see-it, sensitivity, investigative, saturation, humanistic, reformist and a few more." The Magic Writing Machine—Student Probes of the New Journalism , a collection edited and introduced by Everette E. Dennis, came up with six categories, labelled new nonfiction (reportage), alternative journalism ("modern muckraking"), advocacy journalism, underground journalism and precision journalism. Michael Johnson's The New Journalism addresses itself to three phenomena:

4356-404: The course of his research, Wolfe interviewed Malcolm Cowley , Archibald MacLeish , and James T. Farrell . A biographer remarked on the thesis: "Reading it, one sees what has been the most baleful influence of graduate education on many who have suffered through it: It deadens all sense of style." Originally rejected, his thesis was finally accepted after he rewrote it in an objective rather than

4455-459: The datum or piece of information but the scene. Scene is what underlies "the sophisticated strategies of prose". The first of the new breed of nonfiction writers to receive wide notoriety was Truman Capote , whose 1965 best-seller, In Cold Blood , was a detailed narrative of the murder of a Kansas farm family. Capote culled material from some 6,000 pages of notes. The book brought its author instant celebrity. Capote announced that he had created

4554-553: The deadline, he typed a letter to Dobell explaining what he wanted to say on the subject, ignoring all journalistic conventions. Dobell's response was to remove the salutation "Dear Byron" from the top of the letter and publish it intact as reportage. The result, published in 1963, was "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." The article was widely discussed—loved by some, hated by others. Its notoriety helped Wolfe gain publication of his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby ,

4653-406: The decline of a poor, bright scholarship student from Alleghany County, North Carolina, after attending an elite university. He conveys an institution filled with snobbery, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and sexual promiscuity. The novel met with a mostly tepid response by critics. Many social conservatives praised it in the belief that its portrayal revealed widespread moral decline. The novel won

4752-664: The editors E.W Johnson and Tom Wolfe, include George Plimpton for Paper Lion , Life writer James Mills and Robert Christgau , et cetera, in the corps. Christgau, however, stated in a 2001 interview that he does not see himself as a New Journalist. The editors Clay Felker, Normand Poirier and Harold Hayes also contributed to the rise of New Journalism. While many praised the New Journalist's style of writing, Wolfe et al., also received severe criticism from contemporary journalists and writers. Essentially two different charges were leveled against New Journalism: criticism against it as

4851-528: The essay to stream-of-consciousness... In the eighties, the use of New Journalism saw a decline, several of the old trailblazers still used fiction techniques in their nonfiction books. However, younger writers in Esquire and Rolling Stone , where the style had flourished in the two earlier decades, shifted away from the New Journalism. Fiction techniques had not been abandoned by these writers, but they were used sparingly and less flamboyantly. "Whatever happened to

4950-455: The excessive insularity of the art world and its dependence on what he saw as faddish critical theory. In From Bauhaus to Our House he explored what he said were the negative effects of the Bauhaus style on the evolution of modern architecture. In 2016, Wolfe published The Kingdom of Speech , a critique of the work of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky . Wolfe synthesized what he construed as

5049-455: The existential threat of mass-extinction into public-consciousness for the first time for most of their contemporary readers. Much of the criticism favorable to this New Journalism came from the writers themselves. Talese and Wolfe, in a panel discussion cited earlier, asserted that, although what they wrote may look like fiction, it was indeed reporting: "Fact reporting, leg work", Talese called it. Wolfe, in Esquire for December, 1972, hailed

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5148-405: The fray. The novel was selected to be adapted into a television series by Netflix in 2021. In 2001, Wolfe published an essay referring to his three main literary critics as "My Three Stooges." That year he also published Hooking Up (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novella Ambush at Fort Bragg ). He published his third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), chronicling

5247-481: The genre "New Art Journalism", which allowed him to test it both as art and as journalism. He concluded that the new literary form was useful only in the hands of literary artists of great talent. In the first of two pieces by Wolfe in New York detailing the growth of the new nonfiction and its techniques, Wolfe returned to the fortuitous circumstances surrounding the construction of Kandy-Kolored and added: Its virtue

5346-500: The genre, as well. Various people and tendencies throughout the history of American journalism have been labeled "new journalism". Robert E. Park , for instance, in his Natural History of the Newspaper , referred to the advent of the penny press in the 1830s as "new journalism". Likewise, the appearance of the yellow press —papers such as Joseph Pulitzer 's New York World in the 1880s—led journalists and historians to proclaim that

5445-512: The homicide squad in The Bronx . While the research came easily, he encountered difficulty in writing. To overcome his writer's block, Wolfe wrote to Jann Wenner , editor of Rolling Stone , to propose an idea drawn from Charles Dickens and Thackeray: to serialize his novel. Wenner offered Wolfe around $ 200,000 to serialize his work. The frequent deadline pressure gave him the motivation he had sought, and from July 1984 to August 1985, he published

5544-401: The human future but because he makes us share the enthusiasm with which he perceives the actual." Critic Dwight Garner praised Wolfe as "a brilliantly gifted social observer and satirist" who "made a fetish of close and often comically slashing detail" and was "unafraid of kicking up at the pretensions of the literary establishment." Harold Bloom described Wolfe as "a fierce storyteller, and

5643-485: The influential book The Right Stuff about the Mercury Seven astronauts, which was made into a 1983 film of the same name directed by Philip Kaufman . His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities , published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and also became a commercial success. Its adaptation as a motion picture of the same name, directed by Brian De Palma , was a critical and commercial failure. Wolfe

5742-727: The journalist asks the subject what they were thinking or how they felt. There is little consensus on which writers can be definitively categorized as New Journalists. In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective , Murphy writes that New Journalism "involves a more or less well defined group of writers," who are "stylistically unique" but share "common formal elements". Among the most prominent New Journalists, Murphy lists: Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, David Halberstam , Pete Hamill, Larry L. King , Norman Mailer, Joe McGinniss , Rex Reed , Mike Royko, John Sack , Dick Schaap, Terry Southern , Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Dan Wakefield and Tom Wolfe. In The New Journalism ,

5841-477: The majority, a synthesis of journalism and literature that the book's postscript called "journalit". In 1972, in "An Enemy of the Novel", Krim identified his own fictional roots and declared that the needs of the time compelled him to move beyond fiction to a more "direct" communication to which he promised to bring all of fiction's resources. David McHam, in an article titled "The Authentic New Journalists", distinguished

5940-517: The manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers. In addition to his own work, Wolfe edited a collection of New Journalism with E. W. Johnson, published in 1973 and titled The New Journalism . This book published pieces by Truman Capote , Hunter S. Thompson , Norman Mailer , Gay Talese , Joan Didion , and several other well-known writers, with the common theme of journalism that incorporated literary techniques and which could be considered literature. In 1965, Wolfe published

6039-411: The manifold incidental details to round out character (i.e., descriptive incidentals). The result: ... is a form that is not merely like a novel . It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has:

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6138-425: The matter, literary critic Seymour Krim offered his explanation in 1973. I'm certain that [Pete] Hamill first used the expression. In about April of 1965 he called me at Nugget Magazine, where I was editorial director, and told me he wanted to write an article about new New Journalism. It was to be about the exciting things being done in the old reporting genre by Talese, Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin . He never wrote

6237-500: The movie as himself. Throughout his early career, Wolfe had planned to write a novel to capture the wide reach of American society. Among his models was William Makepeace Thackeray 's Vanity Fair , which described the society of 19th-century England. In 1981, he ceased his other work to concentrate on the novel. Wolfe began researching the novel by observing cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court and shadowing members of

6336-463: The nonfiction reportage of Capote, Wolfe and others from other, more generic interpretations of New Journalism. Also in 1971, William L. Rivers disparaged the former and embraced the latter, concluding, "In some hands, they add a flavor and a humanity to journalistic writing that push it into the realm of art." Charles Brown in 1972 reviewed much that had been written as New Journalism and about New Journalism by Capote, Wolfe, Mailer and others and labelled

6435-560: The people he observed, making him, in their eyes, "a man from Mars, the man who didn't know anything and was eager to know." In 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper's Magazine , titled " Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast ". It criticized modern American novelists for failing to engage fully with their subjects, and suggested that modern literature could be saved by a greater reliance on journalistic technique. Asked to comment by The Wall Street Journal on blogs in 2007 to mark

6534-448: The people you are writing about for long stretches ... long enough so that you are actually there when revealing scenes take place in their lives." Saturation reporting differs from "in-depth" and "investigative" reporting, which involve the direct interviewing of numerous sources and/or the extensive analyzing of external documents relating to the story. Saturation reporting, according to communication professor Richard Kallan, "entails

6633-468: The piece, so far as I know, but I began using the expression in conversation and writing. It was picked up and stuck. But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as in 1960 when Norman Mailer broke away from fiction to write " Superman Comes to the Supermarket ". A report of John F. Kennedy 's nomination that year, the piece established

6732-447: The political right. In 2004, Wolfe noted his support for political correctness , which he described as "a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets." However, in 2017, he attacked political correctness, mocking it as perpetual outrage. In 2016, Wolfe described Donald Trump as a "lovable megalomaniac...The childishness makes him seem honest." Wolfe later compared Trump to literary character Jay Gatsby . Wolfe

6831-447: The practice of journalism. But a significant portion of the critical literature deals with form and technique. Critical comment dealing with New Journalism as a literary-journalistic genre (a distinct type of category of literary work grouped according to similar and technical characteristics) treats it as the new nonfiction . Its traits are extracted from the criticism written by those who claim to practice it and by others. Admittedly it

6930-606: The reason he was hired by the Post was his lack of interest in politics. The Post's city editor was "amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill , the beat every reporter wanted." He won an award from The Newspaper Guild for foreign reporting in Cuba in 1961 and also won the Guild's award for humor. While there, Wolfe experimented with fiction-writing techniques in feature stories. In 1962, Wolfe left Washington D.C. for New York City, taking

7029-417: The replacement of the novel by the New Journalism as literature's "main event" and detailed the points of similarity and contrast between the New Journalism and the novel. The four techniques of realism that he and the other New Journalists employed, he wrote, had been the sole province of novelists and other literati . They are scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view and

7128-401: The simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened . The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved. The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer

7227-525: The style eventually infected other magazines and then books. Rarely mentioned, perhaps because they are somewhat less playfully countercultural in tone, as early and eminent exemplars of the new form are: Hannah Arendt's " Eichmann in Jerusalem "(1963) and John Hersey's " Hiroshima " (1946), and Rachel Carson's " Silent Spring "(1962); articles which introduced, respectively, the Holocaust , nuclear war and

7326-413: The summer, in the style of Southern gentlemen . He found that the suit he had bought was too heavy for summer use, so he wore it in winter, which created a sensation. At the time, white suits were supposed to be reserved for summer wear. Wolfe maintained this as a trademark. He sometimes accompanied it with a white tie, white homburg hat , and two-tone spectator shoes . Wolfe said that the outfit disarmed

7425-769: The tenth anniversary of their advent, Wolfe wrote that "the universe of blogs is a universe of rumors" and that "blogs are an advance guard to the rear." He also took the opportunity to criticize Misplaced Pages, saying that "only a primitive would believe a word of" it. He noted a story about him in his Misplaced Pages bio article at the time which he said had never happened. Wolfe's views and choice of subject material, such as mocking left-wing intellectuals in Radical Chic , glorifying astronauts in The Right Stuff , and critiquing Noam Chomsky in The Kingdom of Speech sometimes resulted in his being labeled conservative . Wolfe has been labeled

7524-445: The things I have mocked." Wolfe opposed the American two-party system . Wolfe supported George W. Bush as a political candidate and said he voted for him for president in 2004 because of what he called Bush's "great decisiveness and willingness to fight". Bush reciprocated the admiration, and is said to have read all of Wolfe's books, according to friends in 2005. Wolfe supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan , but opposed

7623-414: The title character is a student of neuroscience. Wolfe describes the characters' thought and emotional processes, such as fear, humiliation and lust, in the clinical terminology of brain chemistry. Wolfe also frequently gives detailed descriptions of various aspects of his characters' anatomies. Wolfe adopted wearing a white suit as a trademark in 1962. He bought his first white suit, planning to wear it in

7722-479: The underground press, the artists of nonfiction, and changes in the established media. Matthew Arnold is credited with coining the term "New Journalism" in 1887, which went on to define an entire genre of newspaper history, particularly Lord Northcliffe's turn-of-the-century press empire. However, at the time, the target of Arnold's irritation was not Northcliffe, but the sensational journalism of Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead . He strongly disapproved of

7821-458: The use of status symbols, Wolfe has said, "I think every living moment of a human being's life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status." Wolfe also championed what he called "saturation reporting," a reportorial approach in which the journalist "shadows" and observes the subject over an extended period of time. "To pull it off," says Wolfe, "you casually have to stay with

7920-502: The very literary establishment on which Wolfe had long heaped scorn. Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there was widespread interest in his second. This novel took him more than 11 years to complete; A Man in Full was published in 1998. The book's reception was not universally favorable, though it received glowing reviews in Time , Newsweek , The Wall Street Journal , and elsewhere. An initial printing of 1.2 million copies

8019-453: The views of Alfred Russel Wallace and Chomsky on the language organ as not being a product of natural selection to suggest that speech is an invention that is responsible for establishing our humanity. Some critics claimed that Wolfe's view on how humans developed speech were not supported by research and were opinionated. In 1977, PBS produced Tom Wolfe's Los Angeles , a fictional, satirical TV movie set in Los Angeles. Wolfe appears in

8118-457: The whole of a culture, including those elements considered profane. Wolfe's undergraduate thesis, entitled "A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America," evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951. While still in college, Wolfe continued playing baseball as a pitcher and began to play semi-professionally. In 1952, he earned

8217-408: The world around them and termed such creative journalism "hystory" to connote their involvement in what they reported. Talese in 1970, in his Author's Note to Fame and Obscurity , a collection of his pieces from the 1960s, wrote: The new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than

8316-585: The writer's opinion, ideas or involvement to creep into the story. Much of the critical literature concerns itself with a strain of subjectivism which may be called activism in news reporting. In 1970, Gerald Grant wrote disparagingly in Columbia Journalism Review of a "New Journalism of passion and advocacy" and in the Saturday Review Hohenberg discussed "The Journalist As Missionary" For Masterson in 1971, "The New Journalism" provided

8415-557: Was a biting account of a party given by composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party . "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers" was about the practice by some African Americans of using racial intimidation ("mau-mauing") to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats ("flak catchers"). Wolfe's phrase, " radical chic ", soon became a popular derogatory term for critics to apply to upper-class leftism . His Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1977) included Wolfe's noted essay, The "Me" Decade and

8514-440: Was a literary artist, not a journalist, but critics hailed the book as a classic example of New Journalism. Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby , whose introduction and title story, according to James E. Murphy, "emerged as a manifesto of sorts for the nonfiction genre," was published the same year. In his introduction, Wolfe wrote that he encountered trouble fashioning an Esquire article out of material on

8613-591: Was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He majored in English, was sports editor of the college newspaper, and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah, giving him opportunities to practice his writing both inside and outside the classroom. Of particular influence was his professor Marshall Fishwick , a teacher of American studies educated at UVA and Yale . More in the tradition of anthropology than literary scholarship, Fishwick taught his students to look at

8712-622: Was an atheist but said that "I hate people who go around saying they're atheists". Of his religious upbringing, Wolfe observed that he "was raised as a Presbyterian ". He sometimes referred to himself as a "lapsed Presbyterian." Wolfe was a defender of Catholic schools . Wolfe was also critical of the sexual revolution , describing it as a "sexual carnival." He expressed sympathy towards Puritanical-Christian views on sexuality. Wolfe lived in New York City with his wife Sheila, who designed covers for Harper's Magazine . They had two children:

8811-442: Was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism , a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques. Much of Wolfe's work is satirical and centres on the counterculture of the 1960s and issues related to class , social status , and the lifestyles of the economic and intellectual elites of New York City . Wolfe began his career as

8910-463: Was announced and the book stayed at number one on The New York Times ' bestseller list for ten weeks. Noted author John Updike wrote a critical review for The New Yorker , complaining that the novel "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." His comments sparked an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media among Wolfe and Updike, and authors John Irving and Norman Mailer , who also entered

9009-524: Was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia , the son of Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr. (1893–1972), an agronomist and editor of The Southern Planter . He grew up on Gloucester Road in the Richmond North Side neighborhood of Sherwood Park . He recounted childhood memories in a foreword to a book about the nearby historic Ginter Park neighborhood. He

9108-458: Was criticised by Norman Mailer , John Updike and John Irving , after they were asked if they believed that his books were deserving of their critical acclaim. Mailer compared reading a Wolfe novel to having sex with a 300 lb woman, saying, "Once she gets to the top it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated." Updike was more literary in his reservedness: He claimed that A Man in Full "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in

9207-479: Was frightened by the quality of his work. Later that year he published an essay titled My Three Stooges about the critics. Wolfe's writing throughout his career showed an interest in social status competition. Much of Wolfe's later work addresses neuroscience . He notes his fascination in "Sorry, Your Soul Just Died", one of the essays in Hooking Up . This topic is also featured in I Am Charlotte Simmons , as

9306-541: Was leaving his longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux . His fourth novel, Back to Blood , was published in October 2012 by Little, Brown and Company . According to The New York Times , Wolfe was paid close to US$ 7 million for the book. According to the publisher, Back to Blood is about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first." The book

9405-406: Was precisely in showing me the possibility of there being something "new" in journalism. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate nonfiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of

9504-411: Was released to mixed reviews. Back to Blood was an even bigger commercial failure than I Am Charlotte Simmons . Kurt Vonnegut said Wolfe is "the most exciting—or, at least, the most jangling—journalist to appear in some time," and "a genius who will do anything to get attention." Paul Fussell called Wolfe a splendid writer and stated "Reading him is exhilarating not because he makes us hopeful of

9603-563: Was student council president, editor of the school newspaper, and a star baseball player at St. Christopher's School , an Episcopal all-boys school in Richmond. In 1991, he wrote another touching remembrance of his childhood in Sherwood Park in a letter to a man who purchased the Wolfe home place. Upon graduation in 1947, he turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University . At Washington and Lee, Wolfe

9702-511: Was the first to apply fiction techniques to reporting. Esquire claimed credit as the seedbed for these new techniques. Esquire editor Harold Hayes later wrote that "in the Sixties, events seemed to move too swiftly to allow the osmotic process of art to keep abreast, and when we found a good novelist we immediately sought to seduce him with the sweet mysteries of current events." Soon others, notably New York , followed Esquire ' s lead, and

9801-515: Was widely regarded as part of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s; in 1965 he joined the New York Herald Tribune ′s staff, which included Jimmy Breslin , Tom Wolfe and Dick Schaap . His robust prose was often laced with a startling, often funny, candor. In his introduction to Jack Kerouac 's novel Desolation Angels , published in 1965, Krim argued for Kerouac's place in the annals of American literature. He taught writing seminars at

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