A label for a gradual change
“New Journalism” was not a single event in 1967. The style developed across the mid-1960s and was given a name and a manifesto only in 1973, when Tom Wolfe published an anthology called The New Journalism, with an introduction arguing that magazine writers had begun to do what novelists were no longer doing: describing contemporary society in rich detail. Wolfe’s claim was partly polemical and partly promotional, and not everyone in the anthology accepted the label. Even so, the term remains the standard way to describe a group of writers who borrowed the tools of fiction for factual reporting.
The year 1967 is a useful vantage point because several important works appeared or were in progress around it, and the events they covered, from the hippie scene in San Francisco to antiwar protests, seemed to demand a different kind of writing.
What the techniques were
Wolfe listed four devices that he thought typified the approach, and they are still a handy summary:
- Scene-by-scene construction, telling a story through a sequence of dramatised moments rather than a summary.
- Extensive dialogue, recorded in full instead of a brief quotation.
- Third-person point of view, in which the writer tries to show what a character was thinking.
- Status details, such as clothing, furniture and manners, that reveal how people see their place in society.
Other writers used first-person voices and made themselves part of the story. That practice differed from the conventional newspaper approach, in which the reporter was meant to be absent and the facts were arranged in descending order of importance.
The writers and their works
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, serialised in The New Yorker in 1965 and published as a book in 1966, was an early landmark. Capote called it a “nonfiction novel,” and it showed that a true crime story could be told with the pace and structure of a novel, although later critics questioned how closely some scenes followed the record.
Tom Wolfe had made his name with essays on American style and status, collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). His account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, appeared in 1968. Its breathless prose, full of exclamation marks and invented typographical effects, tried to reproduce the experience of the psychedelic scene rather than just describe it.
Joan Didion wrote in a cooler, more controlled voice. Her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” about young people in the Haight-Ashbury district, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in September 1967, and it became the title piece of her 1968 collection. Didion did not present the scene as a triumph. She wrote about disorder, thin supervision of children and a sense that the adult world had lost its footing. Her willingness to admit her own unease was part of the technique.
Hunter S. Thompson’s first book, Hell’s Angels, was published in 1967 and came from a year spent among the motorcycle club in California. It was still closer to conventional reporting than his later work. The more personal and exaggerated approach that became known as “gonzo” came into view around 1970, with a piece on the Kentucky Derby, and it grew from there.
Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, about the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, was published in 1968. Mailer wrote about himself in the third person, calling himself by name as a character, and subtitled the book “History as a Novel / The Novel as History.” It is discussed in more detail in a separate article.
Other practitioners included Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin and Gail Sheehy, and the style appeared in magazines such as Esquire, New York and, from late 1967, Rolling Stone magazine, whose first issue came out in November that year.
Why it suited the moment
Several things came together in the 1960s. The war in Vietnam was producing official statements that many reporters found hard to reconcile with what they saw, and the press began to ask whether “objectivity” simply meant repeating what officials said. Writers who had grown up with the novel wanted to bring emotional truth to subjects such as race, protest and youth culture, which a conventional wire story could not convey.
Television also changed what print could offer. When viewers could see an event on the evening news, magazines gained an incentive to provide what television lacked: context, interior thought and long, well-observed scenes. Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the effect of media on perception, also found elsewhere on this site, formed part of the intellectual backdrop.
Finally, the subjects were new. The counterculture and the protest movement did not follow the familiar routines of politics or crime coverage, and writers who joined those scenes, took drugs or lived with the people they wrote about were able to describe them in ways that outsiders could not.
Objections and limits
The style attracted criticism then and now. Some editors and fellow reporters argued that reconstructed dialogue and imagined thoughts blurred the line between fact and fiction. Questions about how much a writer could invent, compress or rearrange continued for decades and still arise in discussion of memoirs and narrative nonfiction. Defenders replied that traditional reporting also involved selection and bias, and that the new writers were simply more open about their presence.
There were also practical limits. This kind of work took time and space that most daily newspapers did not have, so it flourished in magazines and book-length projects.
Legacy
The techniques of New Journalism, including detailed scenes, a personal voice and attention to social detail, became part of ordinary magazine and book writing. Long-form narrative reporting, memoir and much of today’s feature journalism draw on them. Whether it counts as a movement or as a convenient label for several different talents is still debated, but the best of this work remains a major source for how the 1960s felt to those who lived through them.