new journalism

I am reading a book called The Gang Who Couldn't Write Straight at the moment. It's about Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion et al and the New Journalism movement. It's wonderful, and I find reading about this time in journalism and media fascinating. But I've always felt a little uncomfortable with the hype and hope pinned on new journalism - was "new journalism" really that new?

I read a piece on the Paris Review today which I think is quite apt. It's an interview with John McPhee. I've not read any of his work, but reading this has made me inspired to write again, which is a nice feeling after a three-month stint at the Sunday paper regurgitating press releases and writing drivel about television programmes I haven't watched.


INTERVIEWER You were writing in the sixties and seventies, when there was a lot of talk about New Journalism. What was your attitude toward that? Did you feel that something different was happening in nonfiction writing?
MCPHEE Well, something was happening in the Sunday magazine of The New York Herald Tribune. It’s often described as some kind of revolution, but I never really understood that. Nonfiction writing didn’t begin in 1960. Going back, there were so many nonfiction writers—what about Liebling? Walter Lord, James Agee, Alva Johnston, Joseph Mitchell—these are people who had prepared the way, and, more than that, had written many better things than these so-called New Journalists would ever do. Henry David Thoreau, for all that, was a New Journalist of his time, as were Dorothy Day, Ida Tarbell, Willa Cather between the ages of twenty and forty at McClure’s Magazine, John Lloyd Stephens, Richard Henry Dana Jr., and on back to Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, James Boswell, and Daniel Defoe. You get the point.
       New Journalism sounded like labeling for labeling’s sake. Some of the things were really interesting to read, but there was too much precedent challenging the word new. Anytime I was called a New Journalist I winced a little with embarrassment.
       Tom Wolfe helped bring a certain amount of attention to this kind of writing. But he’s just Tom Wolfe. It didn’t happen because one person did it. It happened because a whole bunch of people across a lot of time were interested in making pieces of writing out of factual material that would stand up on their own. They were not just writing articles telling you how to recover from hypothermia.


You can read the rest here...