Literary journalism aims to be factual while using the techniques commonly associated with literary writing, particularly literary fiction—all in service of illuminating a larger
or “literary” truth about human existence. It has sometimes
been called “creative nonfiction,” “artistic nonfiction,” “the
nonfiction novel,” and “the news story.”
Perhaps the best brief definition of literary journalism
was provided by Stephen Crane, one of its late nineteenthcentury practitioners, when he described his goal: to give
the reader the “feel of the facts.” Literary journalism has
also been called “new journalism,” especially by Tom
Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and other literary
journalists of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, who sought,
by using this term, to differentiate themselves from their
predecessors.
Literary journalism is a vibrant prose tradition that dates
back at least to Daniel Defoe in mid-seventeenth-century
England, whose A Journal of the Plague Year is a factual,
painstakingly reported, literary account. Many scholars,
such as Avis Meyer, also point to the great English essayists
such as Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift,
and Ben Johnson as important figures in bridging the gap
between journalism and literature. Certainly Addison and
Steele’s Tatler and Spectator established in early eighteenth-century England the informative or persuasive periodical essay as a major form. Indeed, Addison and Steele’s
work influenced colonial American newspaper editors such
as James Franklin and his brother Ben, who tried to craft
journalism that was factual, interesting, and written with
literary panache. Nineteenth-century British writers such
as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens are
also important precursors.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary journalism developed in the United States as a recognizable,
ongoing genre, as Thomas B. Connery notes in his pathbreaking 1992 essay, “Discovering a Literary Form.” Outstanding practitioners of the form who emerged during the
nineteenth century include Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain),
Richard Harding Davis, George Ade, Abraham Cahan,
Julian Ralph, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Hutchins
Hapgood, Walt Whitman, Lincoln Steffens, and William
Hard. They published in a variety of magazines such as
Harper’s and Arena and in many newspapers.
Twain’s journalism, for example, was substantial and
influential, with a distinctively literary quality that made
good use of the American vernacular. In fact, he wrote
many of his most humorous pieces for newspapers, an
outlet with fewer constraints than the genteel nineteenthcentury book publishing industry. “Among his contemporaries,” Jack A. Nelson writes in A Sourcebook of American
Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre, “Twain’s wit, his style, his pithy observations and mordant insights, along with his frontier-honed skill at
cutting through sham, hypocrisy, pretense, and show to get
at the bare-boned reality of a thing, made his work sought
after then and makes it readable and pertinent yet” (p. 41).
Stephen Crane’s New York Tribune sketches are masterpieces of characterization and description. In “The Men in
the Storm” (1894), he paints a stark contrast between middle-class pedestrians heading home during a fierce winter
storm with “an absolute expression of hot dinners in [their]
pace” and a group of homeless men waiting to get into a
shelter, for whom “these things were as if they were not.”
Ultimately, Crane’s narrative says something about the
harshness of nature, a frequent theme in his other literary
journalism (“The Open Boat,” 1897) and in his naturalistic
fiction (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 1893).
Crane and others were writing in a period pivotal to
the development of literary journalism, about 1890–1910.
During this time, massive social and cultural changes may
have sparked the advance of this alternative to conventional
journalism, as they did during the 1930s and 1940s and
during the 1960s and 1970s. Put simply, in times of crisis,
journalism—particularly literary journalism that aims to
transcend the limits of “objective” conventional journalism—seems to thrive.
The 1930s and 1940s brought the Great Depression,
World War II, and the development of atomic weapons. Not
surprisingly, this was a rich period in literary journalism’s
development as writers experimented with different ways
to report on the nuances of the day’s important stories.
One was James Agee, who developed a kind of documentary prose-poetry to tell the story of Alabama sharecroppers. His Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, illustrated with
Walker Evans’s photographs of the sharecropper families
and their surroundings, informs at the level of literature.
Another important figure in this period was Ernest
Hemingway, who forged a unique prose style highly
influenced by his career as a reporter at the Kansas City
Star. He seemed always mindful of the newspaper’s stylesheet admonitions to “use short sentences, use short first
paragraphs, use vigorous English.” Despite Hemingway’s
disavowal of the value of his time as a reporter for his subsequent writing, it was this very experience that led him
to create a signature lean and powerful writing style—for
both his literary journalism and his subsequent literary
fiction.
The challenges of the 1930s also formed the crucible
of Depression-era advocacy journalism, sometimes with a
decidedly literary bent, as shown by the work of Dorothy
Day and Meridel LeSueur. In her reportage, columns, and
commentary for the Catholic Worker, Day demonstrated the
skills that could have led her to a successful fiction writing
career. Instead, she crafted literary journalism that dramatized the plight of the poor and homeless in New York City.
Her contemporary Meridel LeSueur also found inspiration
in the story of the struggles of the masses; her “Women on
the Breadlines” remains a masterpiece of Depression literary journalism in its sensitive evocation of the impact of
poverty.
At the end of World War II, John Hersey’s Hiroshima
(originally published as a special issue of the New Yorker
in 1946), addressed the crucial issue of the day, the development of the atomic bomb, and raised the question of
whether using such a weapon against civilians was ever justifiable. Britain’s Rebecca West examined law and civilization in works such as Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941),
a study of Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, and her
two books on the Nuremburg treason trials. George Orwell,
another British author, wrote powerful studies of the European working poor and the Spanish Civil War, among other
works of literary journalism.
In the twentieth century, owing to newspapers’ adoption
of “objectivity” as a professional norm, magazines have
assumed preeminence as a repository of literary journalism—among them the The New Yorker, Texas Monthly,
Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.
The New Yorker, founded by Harold Ross in 1925, has nurtured a long list of literary journalists, including E.B. White,
James Thurber, Lillian Ross, Janet Flanner, A.J. Liebling,
Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, and Joseph Mitchell.
Other practitioners of the so-called New Journalism
of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond include Truman Capote,
Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Michael Herr,
Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, Gloria Steinem, Tracy
Kidder, Jane Kramer, Susan Orlean, John McPhee, and
Mark Singer. The period of the Vietnam War, in particular,
saw political, social, and cultural change that found expression in many singular book-length works of literary journalism, among them Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), Mailer’s
The Armies of the Night (1968), Wolfe’s Radical Chic and
Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers(1970), Didion’s Slouching
Towards Bethlehem (1968), and Herr’s Dispatches(1977).
This period saw considerable discussion and debate
about the limits of literary journalism, with traditionalists
such as Hersey and Ross arguing that professional journalistic norms of accuracy and factual verifiability forbade the
use of techniques such as interior monologue. How, they
asked, could a responsible reporter really expect that a
source remembers what he or she was thinking at a particular time? Others such as Mailer maintained the literary
journalist’s right to claim such insight and even called what
they were doing “New Journalism.”
In a fascinating study of “The Politics of the New Journalism,” scholar John J. Pauly notes, “The very term New
Journalism proved singularly effective at calling out opponents into symbolic combat…offering “a double dare to the
establishments of Journalism and Literature. It challenges
the authority of Journalism’s empire of facts, and the sanctity of Literature’s garden of imagination” (p. 110).
In the early twenty-first century, such debates were
long forgotten as literary journalists such as Richard
Rhodes, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Tracy Kidder, and Susan
Orlean continued to push the boundaries of that borderland between fact and fiction, literary journalism. Today
magazines remain frequent forums for their efforts, but
full-length books of literary journalism also are proving
highly popular. In fact, where once reporters at the end of the day and on breaks used to have a novel going in the desk
drawer, today’s journalists frequently have a book-length
work of literary journalism in their computers that they try
to work on in their spare time. This, too, says something
about the institutionalization of literary journalism today as
a distinctive genre in its own right.
Further Reading
Connery, Thomas B. “Discovering a Literary Form.” In A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre, edited by Thomas. B. Connery,
3–37. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
——. “Research Review: Magazines and Literary Journalism,
An Embarrassment of Riches.” In The American Magazine:
Research Perspectives and Prospects, ed. David Abrahamson, 207–216. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and
Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985, 3–10.
Hartsock, John C. A History of American Literary Journalism:
The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
Kerrane, Kevin, and Ben Yagoda, eds. The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism. New York, NY:
Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Kramer, Mark. “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists.” In Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American
Nonfi ction, edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer. New
York: Ballantine, 1995.
Pauly, John J. “The Politics of the New Journalism.” In Literary
Journalism in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman
Sims, 129. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Sims, Norman. “The Art of Literary Journalism.” In Literary
Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfi ction, edited by Norman Sims, and Mark Kramer, 3–19. New
York: Ballantine, 1995.
——. “Introduction.” In The Literary Journalists, edited by Norman Sims, 3–25. New York: Ballantine, 1984.
——, ed. Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Weber, Ronald. Journalism, Writing, and American Literature,
Occasional Paper No. 5, Gannett Center for Media Studies
(now Freedom Forum), April 1987, 1–15.
Nancy L. Roberts