new journalism WAS Re: Wolfe

[Timothy Strzechowski]

For the most part, I think David Morris provides the best working definition of
New Journalism.  Here are a few additional thoughts:

New Journalism makes use of a writer/reporter  who abandons the clean and
"objective" approach of the traditional straight news story and reports on
events while incorporating his own biases toward the event.  According to Wolfe,
novelists of the 1960s failed to truly capture the morals, manners, social and
political attitudes, and lifestyles of the time; consequently, New Journalism
attempted to capture the zeitgeist of the Sixties through a modified combination
of traditional narrative and journalistic elements.  By including whole scenes
shown through a particular character's eyes, portraying events as scene-by-scene
dramatic narratives, recording full dialogue, and commenting on the attitudes,
manners, and lifestyles of the time, the New Journalist could through his
heightened subjectivity "strive for a higher form of 'objectivity'" by revealing
"the story hidden beneath those facts" (John Hollowell, _Fact and Fiction: The
New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel_, 1977).

The two BEST examples of New Journalism in its purist form (in my humble
opinion) are:

Tom Wolfe, _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_ --- the narrator (Wolfe) is
virtually non-existent in the story itself, but plunges the reader into the
mindset of the Panksters and the LSD experience.

Norman Mailer, _The Armies of the Night: History as Novel / Novel as History_
--- depicts two Mailers, one as a reporter of the Pentagon march and another as
a character within the event.

Truman Capote's _In Cold Blood_ and Hunter S. Thompson's _Fear and Loathing on
the Campaign Trail: 1972_ are also classic examples of NJ, though for several
reasons I find them inferior to the aforementioned works.

TStrz