Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?: How New Journalism Rewrote the World by Marc Weingarten

by Marc Weingarten

The list of classic works of New Journalism goes on and In Cold Blood, The Right Stuff, Armies of the Night, Dispatches, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hiroshima, Slouching Towards not only are they all still in print after 40 years, but also as accepted classics. Their authors - Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer - are also acknowledged as some of America's greatest twentieth-century writers. But they wrote non-fiction, not novels, about big subjects like Vietnam, the Hippie culture, notorious murders, the space programme. And the then revolutionary new brand of non-fiction they pioneered - narrative and novelistic, yet documentary and often with a spacedout, forensic detachment - has now become so much part of the mainstream that we can read books like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil without realising their debt to the early New Journalists of the sixties. Marc Weingarten's book tells for the first time how they pushed reportage beyond its narrow limits and changed the literary culture, and the fascinating stories behind the research and writing of books such as in Cold Blood.

Paperback

First published September 25, 2005

About the author

Marc Weingarten is an author, journalist, editor and filmmaker. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Guy Ferguson]

Seems to be called "From Hipsters to Gonzo" out here. Same cover, same subtitle. Interesting so far - covers history of NJ from the 1700s onwards - Swift and Dickens, to Orwell and London then on to Wolfe, Thompson and Didion.

[Jo Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantastic read. I want to know more about Tom Wolfe after reading Bonfire of the Vanities and this hit the spot perfectly.

I'm not sure if a non-journo would be quite as interested though.