The New Journalism
The New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious. The pieces are notable because they do not conform to the standard dispassionate and even-handed model of journalism. Rather they incorporate literary devices usually only found in fictional works.
Manifesto
The first section of the book consists of four previously published texts by Wolfe: The Feature Game and Like a Novel ; Seizing the Power and Appendix.The text is a against the American novel which Wolfe sees as having hit a dead end by moving away from realism, and his opinion that journalism is much more relevant. In effect, his manifesto is for mixing journalism with literary techniques to document in a more effective way than the novel. These techniques were most likely inspired by writers of social realism, such as Émile Zola and Charles Dickens. His manifesto for New Journalism has four main points.
- Scene by scene construction. Rather than rely on second-hand accounts and background information, Wolfe considers it necessary for the journalist to witness events first hand, and to recreate them for the reader.
- Dialogue. By recording dialogue as fully as possible, the journalist is not only reporting words, but defining and establishing character, as well as involving the reader.
- The third person. Instead of simply reporting the facts, the journalist has to give the reader a real feeling of the events and people involved. One technique for achieving this is to treat the protagonists like characters in a novel. What is their motivation? What are they thinking?
- Status details. Just as important as the characters and the events, are the surroundings, specifically what people surround themselves with. Wolfe describes these items as the tools for a "social autopsy", so we can see people as they see themselves.
Anthology
Texts
Truman Capote, ''In Cold Blood''
The excerpt from In Cold Blood, is the fifth text in the anthology. The excerpt is taken from the third chapter titled Answers. In Cold Blood was initially, published as a four-part serial in The New Yorker, beginning with the September 25, 1965 issue. Answers, which was the third part, was published in the October 25 issue. The book details the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, and his wife and two of their children. When Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, he decided to travel to Kansas and write about the crime. Bringing his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee along, together they interviewed local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. The killers, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested not long after the murders, and Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book. It is considered the originator of the non-fiction novel and the forerunner of the New Journalism movement, although other writers, like Rodolfo Walsh, had already explored the genre in books like Operación Masacre.In the introduction Wolfe writes “For all his attention to novelistic technique, however, Capote does not use point of view in as sophisticated way as he does in fiction. One seldom feels that he is really inside of the minds of the characters. One gets a curious blend of third-person point of view and omniscient narration. Capote probably had sufficient information to use point of view in a more complex fashion but was not yet ready to let himself go in nonfiction.”
Robert Christgau, ''Beth Ann and Macrobioticism''
Beth Ann and Macrobioticism, by Robert Christgau, is the 20th text in the anthology. It was Christgau's first magazine article In 1965 Christgau was a reporter for the Dorf Feature Service in Newark, NJ.| Title | Author | First Published | Magazine/Newspaper First Published in | Book Published in |
| 25 September 1965 | The New Yorker | In Cold Blood | ||
| Beth Ann and Macrobioticism | New York Herald Tribune | |||
| Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream | 7 May 1966 | The Saturday Evening Post | Slouching Towards Bethlehem | |
| ' | ' | |||
| Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse | 6 July 1972 | Rolling Stone | ||
| La Dolce Viva | 29 April 1968 | New York Magazine | ||
| Gear | The Village Voice | |||
| Khesanh | Esquire | |||
| 3 December 1965 | LIFE | |||
| Paper Lion | ||||
| Ava: Life in the Afternoon | Esquire' | Do You Sleep in the Nude? | ||
| Timing and a Diversion: The Cocoa Game | New York World Journal Tribune | |||
| Esquire | M | |||
| Twirling at Ole Miss | Esquire | Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes | ||
| Esquire | ||||
| Scanlan's Monthly | ||||
| 5 June 1966 | The Sunday Times | |||
| Martin Luther King is Still on the Case | Esquire | |||
| Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers | 8 June 1970 | New York Magazine'' |
Reception
Primary sources
Contemporary reviews
The New JournalismTexts in the anthology