Hasten down the wire

Revisiting Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 28 December 2008 01:18PM CST

Section: Media

In 1972, Tom Wolfe defined what he called the New Journalism in two seminal articles in New York magazine, “The Birth of the New Journalism: Eyewitness Report” and “The New Journalism: A la Recherche des Whichy Thickets” (maddeningly unavailable on the web). Here’s how he described the idealized old journalism in the former:

“God knows I didn’t have anything new in mind, much less anything literary, when I took my first newspaper job. I had a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea ... Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn ... Nights down at the saloon listening to “Back of the Stockyards” being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke with lumps of milk glass for eyes ... Nights down at the detective bureau—it was always nighttime in my daydreams of the newspaper life. Reporters didn’t work during the day. I wanted the whole movie, nothing left out ...”

Wolfe goes on to describe the reality of the 1962 New York Herald Tribune as “wreckage and exhaustion everywhere… painted over in an industrial sludge…” populated with scoop reporters and his fellow feature writers.

From the 1930s through the early 1960s, the novel was the holy grail for the then unnamed creative class. The day’s novelists came seemingly from an obscure nowhere, Wolfe observed: “The author, you would be assured, was previously employed as a hod carrier (Steinbeck), a truck dispatcher (Cain), a bellboy (Wright), a Western Union boy (Saroyan), a dishwasher in a Greek restaurant in New York (Faulkner), a truck driver, logger, berry picker, spindle cleaner, crop duster, pilot ... There was no end to it ... Some novelists had whole strings of these credentials ... That way you knew you were getting the real goods ....” Journalists were allowed in the club (New York’s White Horse Tavern on Hudson and 11th) only as would-be novelists. “There was no such thing as a literary journalist working for popular magazines or newspapers.

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