It's hard to say definitively which writers are New Journalists. In The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective Murphy writes, "As a literary genre, New Journalism [...] involves a more or less honk defined group of writers [...]. "[28], The first of the new breed of nonfiction writers to receive wide notoriety was Truman Capote,[29] whose 1965 best-seller, In Cold Blood, was a detailed narrative of the murder of a Kansas farm family. 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.[24]. 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. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved. "[18], For Talese, intensive reportage took the form of interior monologue to discover from his subjects what they were thinking, not, he said in a panel discussion reported in Writer's Digest, merely reporting what people did and said. White's letter to Whitney, dated “April 1965,” contains the following passage: “Tom Wolfe's piece on William Shawn violated every rule of conduct I know anything about. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book. "[38] In "The Newspaper As Literature/Literature As Leadership",[39] he called journalism "the de facto literature" of the majority,[40] a synthesis of journalism and literature that the book's postscript called "journalit. As Wolfe put the case: I am the first to agree that the New Journalism should be as accurate as traditional journalism. I contend that it has already proven itself more accurate than traditional journalism—which unfortunately is saying but so much...[58]. Although much of the critical literature discussed the use of literary or fictional techniques as the basis for a New Journalism, critics also referred to the form as stemming from intensive reporting. Reaction, notably from New Yorker writers, was loud and prolonged,[74]c but the most significant reaction came from Macdonald, who counterattacked in two articles in the New York Review of Books. [77], Wolfe himself returned to the affair a full seven years later, devoting the second of his two February New York articles[78] (1972) to his detractors but not to dispute their attack on his factual accuracy. "The Truman Capotes may hold up a tolerably clear glass to nature," he wrote, "but Wolfe holds up a fun-house mirror, and I for one don't give a hoot whether he calls the reflection fact or fiction."[71]. Various people and tendencies throughout the history of American journalism have been labeled "new journalism". ), Hayes, Gay Talese and Wolfe, with Leonard W. Robinson, "The New Journalism. [8] Michael Johnson's The New Journalism addresses itself to three phenomena: the underground press, the artists of nonfiction, and changes in the established media. It was to be about the exciting things being done in the old reporting genre by Talese, Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. This is sometimes felt to be egotistical, and the frank identification of the author, especially as the "I" instead of merely the impersonal "eye" is often frowned upon and taken as proof of "subjectivity," which is the opposite of the usual journalistic pretense.[33]. Jr., "The New Journalism: A Nonfiction Concept of Writing," unpublished master's thesis, University of Utah, August, 1971, 5 ff. In 1981, Joe Nocera published a postmortem in the Washington Monthly blaming its demise on the journalistic liberties taken by Hunter S. Thompson. [27], The essential difference between the new nonfiction and conventional reporting is, he said, that the basic unit of reporting was no longer the datum or piece of information but the scene. Newsweek reported that critics felt Sheehy's energies were better suited to fiction than fact. In fact my claims for the New Journalism, and my demands upon it, go far beyond that. "I'm certain that [Pete] Hamill first used the expression. [16] 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[53]) treats it as the new nonfiction. "Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine,", W. Steward Pinkerton. [citation needed], While many praised the New Journalist's style of writing, Wolfe et al., also received severe criticism from contemporary journalists and writers. Newfield, in 1972, changed his attitude since his earlier, 1967,[34] review of Wolfe. ^b Wolfe's letter had the original title There Goes (Varoom! [48] In The New Journalism, 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. [49] In contrast to a conventional journalistic striving for an objectivity, subjective journalism allows for the writer's opinion, ideas or involvement to creep into the story. "[7], 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. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than 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. '"[79] Widely criticized was the technique of the composite character,[79] the most notorious example of which was "Redpants," a presumed prostitute whom Gail Sheehy wrote about in New York in a series on that city's sexual subculture. [29] The book brought its author instant celebrity. [16] A 1972 article by Dennis Chase[54] defines New Journalism as a subjective journalism emphasizing "truth" over "facts" but uses major nonfiction stylists as its example. [75], The New Yorker parody, he added, "... revealed the ugly side of Parajournalism when it tries to be serious. In his introduction,[32] Wolfe wrote that he encountered trouble fashioning an Esquire article out of material on a custom car extravaganza in Los Angeles, in 1963. 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". "[70] Sheed offered, in "A Fun-House Mirror," a witty refutation of Wolfe's claim that he takes on the expression and the guise of whomever he is writing about. "[41] 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. 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. 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 reportb detailing the custom car world, complete with scene construction, dialogue and flamboyant description. It is an artistic, creative, literary reporting form with three basic traits: dramatic literary techniques; intensive reporting; and reporting of generally acknowledged subjectivity.[48].