Tom Wolfe And New Journalism

How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre has not been clear. Tom Wolfe, a practitioner and principal advocate of the form,wrote in at least two articles in 1972 that he had no idea of where it began. Trying to shed light on the matter, literary critic Seymour Krim, offered his explanation in 1973.

I'm certain that [Pete] Hamill first used the expression. In about April of 1965 he called me at Nugget Magazine, where I was editorial director, and told me he wanted to write an article about new New Journalism. It was to be about about the exciting things being done in the old reporting genre by Talese, Wolfe and Breslin. He never wrote the piece, so far as I know, but I began using the expression in conversation and writing. It was picked up and stuck.

But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket A report of John F. Kennedy's nomination that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago) and in other nonfiction as well.

Wolfe wrote that his first acquaintance with a new style of reporting came in a 1962 Esquire article about Joe Louis by Gay Talese. “ ‘Joe Louis at Fifty’ a wasn't like a magazine article at all. It was like a short story. It began with a scene, an intimate confrontation between Loius and his third wife...” Wolfe said Talese was the first to apply fiction techniques to reporting.

> from number of sources