Thesis: More than the facts

This is my thesis for my masters in journalism. This should explain the lack of posting recently. Ten thousand words in two days must be a record. I need to sleep now. I don't have the patience to edit it to make it fit in the blog properly, so just bare with me.

More than the facts


The rise of New Journalism and
the impact on the modern media.

By Kevin O’Connor, August 2008





Contents Page Word count

Chapter One: Introduction 3-6 1,158

Chapter Two: Sight and sound 7-15 1,719

Chapter Three: Filling the gaps
Part one 16-22 1,517
Part two 22-27 1,433

Chapter Four:
The strange and terrible saga 28-35 1,767

Chapter Five: Fear and Loathing 36-41 1,440


Chapter Six: Asides and lasting
Influence 42-46 1,758


Total: 10,369


Bibliography 47

Review of Process 48

















Chapter One
Introduction
“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers the opportunity to live it.” – John Hersey, journalist and author.

By the end of this paper, the reader will have a broad knowledge of the history of New Journalism, incorporating the major early works in the genre, and will see how these works affect how we write today. These chapters will trace this influential style of reportage from its early beginnings in America in the nineteen sixties though its explosive genesis before finally examining the lasting affects visible in almost every magazine and newspaper on the shelves of the newsagents today.
A good place to start is to answer the question ‘What is New Journalism?’
New Journalism can be differentiated from ‘straight journalism’ (the name given to all other types of journalism for the purposes of this paper) by a simple set of criteria:
• The story or events are reported using a narrative style, using scenes usually written in the present tense rather than straight journalism’s historical narrative.
• Dialogue is written in full, rather than just cherry picking quotes to fit with the rest of the story. A conversation between two people could take up several paragraphs or pages.
• A first person point of view is encouraged, rather than avoided, usually written from the journalist’s point of view, but can also be from another integral character of the story, or even a made-up character, or a combination of all three. Third person narratives are not uncommon, but usually only form a small part of the overall structure.
• New Journalism often records everyday, seemingly innocuous details about a story which straight reportage would overlook.
• Inner monologue, stream of consciousness and sometimes fantastical and over embellished language as well as humour and hyperbole can feature heavily.
The use of the above techniques had previously only been associated with fictional narratives; novels, short stories and even film. The idea behind writing this way was to transport the reader to the scene of the story, to put them in the place of the journalist/protagonist as much as possible so that they may get a better sense of the story, a better sense of the details and intricacies of the story and engage with it on a deeper level than they might with a normal news story that they would read in a newspaper or magazine or watch on the news. New Journalism used tried and tested methods from fiction writing and applied them to journalism, as the quote at the beginning of this chapter hints at; the reader becomes not just an observer of the history being outlined on the page, but a witness to the first draft of some of the most important events of our time.
In his book, A Mad World, My Masters John Simpson, the foreign correspondent for BBC news says of many modern journalists’ attitude towards the story that they are covering is that “the most important thing about the event is that they are there covering it.” Although this remark can be interpreted in a rather throwaway fashion, Simpson touches on one of the most important aspects of journalism, the fact that a journalist can only report on what they themselves observe, anything more than that is second hand information. New Journalism is often accused of being ‘loose with the facts’ or putting style over the truth, which is something we’ll look at in more detail in a later chapter. However, what most practitioners of New Journalism are attempting to achieve is a purer, more distilled form of reportage, where instead of repackaging the story into something palatable, something suitable for the front page of a broadsheet newspaper, the writer simply tells it as they see it.. When a journalist includes themselves in the story, they are embracing the fact that they are actively in the environment in which the story is taking place, sometimes they even become the story themselves, with the end copy concentrating more on the writer than the subject. In effect, what the journalist is attempting to do is give the story to the reader in a pure, non-diluted form, describing the event to the reader exactly as it happened, or to be more precise, exactly how the writer saw it, which may not be the same as what actually happened. Writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson used this method of first person reportage heavily; we will look at these writers in more detail in later chapters.
In the next chapter, we’ll explore the genesis of New Journalism and why it came about, whether it was a natural evolution in the way journalism was headed, or whether the new technique was a reaction to the changing world around us.
It could be argued that New Journalism, has existed for far longer than the movement in the early sixties and far longer than the term itself, that the technique of using literary techniques to describe real life non fiction has been around for decades, even centuries, from Aristotle to Hemingway. However, this paper argues that the New Journalism movement and its proponents outlined in these chapters are part of a separate, concerted effort to move away from previous news reportage and made a purposeful attempt to forge a new journalistic path for themselves using new and previously unseen methods and as such, deserve a category unto themselves, that category is New Journalism.




















Chapter Two
Sight and Sound
“Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen, and keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again, and don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin, and there's no tellin' who, That it's namin'. For the loser now, will be later to win, for the times they are a-changin'.”- Bob Dylan, The Times they are a changin’, 1963

New Journalism is a vicious circle, its birth in the early sixties was a reaction to all it saw around it, a reflection of the changing times. New journalism itself had the power to affect the world around it; it affected the way people thought about the printed word and what it could achieve. It broke the limitations of what was possible with news journalism and found itself trying to capture the most radically changing time in the history of the twentieth century. In order to understand New Journalism, we must understand the world in which it was being written, the culture which inspired it and the events which made its birth necessary.
John F. Kennedy, one of the most important men of a generation had just been killed, a symbol of youth and of new possibilities was halted in its tracks with a brutal force, a cultural shift was dealt an earth shattering blow with all that remained of it splattered in red across a Dallas street like a stop sign.
The Vietnam War was about to reach a terrifying peak and the images of the youth of a generation being cut down in their prime was being beamed into every home in America in terrifying Technicolor through the relatively new medium of colour television.
A youth led revolution that was reacting with venom to what it saw around it. Rock and Roll was still finding its feet; Bob Dylan was speaking for an entire voiceless mob who was still reeling from what was happening around it. He ‘went electric’, awakening a movement that had remained dormant up till then, awakened by a jolt of electricity and using its new found voice to deride what had gone before it. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy were expressing new ideas that would reverberate around the world…within five years they would all be dead because of the opinions they expressed and the power of change they held. The civil rights movement sent shivers though the collective American spine, the events of the struggle were almost too great, too broad to be contained by a straight news story, a new style of reportage would have to be utilized in order to fully capture it.

The Beat generation of the late fifties had paved the way stylistically and thematically for New Journalism, expressing new and radical ideas that had previously been taboo in American society, exploring the underbelly of youth culture and putting a bit more polish on the mirror that was being held up to society. People like Allen Ginsberg were changing the way people read poetry, with long, fast sentences that burrowed into the brain, using unconventional styles and themes to convey a new and exciting message.
The most important works of literature to come out of the Beat movement that were to have a lasting effect on the way we wrote and pave the way for New Journalism were Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959).
Both novels were heavily influenced by drugs and alcohol, a theme which would later come to the fore in some major works of New Journalism (most notably those by Hunter S. Thompson as we’ll see in a later chapter). Kerouac’s novel is a short text narrated in a quick fire, rambling, highly detailed and stylized fashion which concentrates on seemingly innocuous details and conversations between characters. Ultimately these innocuous details and conversations make up the bulk of the novel, cataloguing a series of events which document the everyday life of a group of extraordinary, larger-than-life characters. The novel finished without any satisfactory conclusion to the bare thread of a story contained within the pages. The entire novel is based on a series of real life events and characters, which come through in great detail in the finished work. Had Kerouac not changed the names of the characters to pseudonyms and changed a few other minor details and stylistic phrasings, he could have in fact have claimed to have written the very first work of New Journalism. As we’ll see in later chapters, New Journalism does not always have to document a specific, newsworthy event, it is sometimes simply enough to document some other aspect of everyday life or culture.
On the Road’s style; a pounding narrative detailing themes of exploration and freedom would affect many of the major works of New Journalism for years to come. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in contrast to On the Road is not significant in the history of New Journalism for its story or themes, but simply for its language and technique. When BIG TABLE Magazine (Issue No. 1, Spring 1959) published ten chapters from Naked Lunch, and sent it to its subscribers, the editor was found guilty of sending obscene material through the U.S. mail for including a piece of writing the Judicial Officer for the United States Postal Service deemed "undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit" and initially judged it as non-mailable under provision 18 of the US penal code. In the subsequent trial, one of the last major censorship trials in the United States of America, evidence was given by many leading professors of English from around the country regarding the literary merit of the work, for example this testimony from John Ciardi – President of College English Association, Rutgers University;
“ Contents of Big Table 1 are "entirely serious in their search
for true values, very deeply concerned with matters of great
social importance." "I may confess to some personal
disagreements of aesthetic principle here and there in the
writing, but in general it must certainly be recorded as work
of substantial artistic accomplishment."
and this testimony from Norman Mailer, author of The Naked and the Dead:
"The 'Ten Episodes From Naked Lunch' by Burroughs are,
I believe, the work of a writer with exceptional talents.
Burroughs creates the atmosphere of his work by the use of a
disciplined chiseled style in which every word seems essential.
That this style, lithe, alert to the cadence and nuance of
every sound, is still able to create for us the wild,
disoriented and fantasy-filled world of the junk addict is part
of its considerable achievement. Burroughs is a literary
phenomenon almost unique in the history of letters.
I could go on to talk about the value of this selection as a
document, for it offers invaluable insight (not without its
medical uses) into the mind of the addict, but I would prefer
to offer instead what is for me, the more powerful argument:
Burroughs may prove to be one of the most important American
writers to be printed since the War.”
These extracts from the hearing transcript of United States Postal Service
Judicial Officer Department Administrative Decisions hearing Docket No. 1/150 July 9, 1959, illustrate just how new and different Naked Lunch was from everything that had been printed previously. This work, a mix of unrelated anecdotes and scenes with hundreds of twisted and unseemly characters intertwined with opinion, exploring previously unheard of ideas about perverse sexuality and hard drug use, opened the literary floodgates for New Journalism, rewriting the rulebook of what was possible to achieve with the printed word, preparing a generation of readers for the changes that were about to take place. In essence, it gave every writer who was to follow carte blanche to write about any subject they wished, and New Journalism was to take every advantage of this freedom.
Now that the stage had been set, the stories that would affect a generation to come needed a stage in which to be showcased, New Journalism needed an outlet for its new and controversial style of feature writing.
In the early sixties Esquire magazine was one of the first pioneering outlets for new journalism, featuring many prominent works from writers such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. Esquire was one of the few magazines that were still unafraid to publish articles of between ten and twenty thousand words at a time or longer; a trait which has all but died out in modern periodical publications owing to the belief by publishers that the readers’ attention span cannot cope with such demanding features.
It wasn’t until 1967 however that Rolling Stone magazine was to become the true home of New Journalism, specifically the form of New Journalism known as Gonzo, which we’ll discuss in a later chapter. Esquire and Rolling Stone were to showcase what would be the golden age of New Journalism’s talent and would go on to inspire a whole new crop of writers who would emulate the style of the genre’s most famous proponents.




Chapter Three
Filling the gaps
Part 1
“A journalistic sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has colour and life; what people are interested in. That’s journalism.” –Burton Rascoe, literary editor, New York Tribune 1922

New Journalism as we know it today was born one morning in the November of 1959. Truman Capote awoke from a restless sleep at eight a.m. on November 16th 1959. He got up early that morning, as he always did, even though his profession did not require the disposition of an early riser, he liked the morning air of Manhattan in the winter. He liked to spend the morning gathering his thoughts and reading before secluding himself in his study to spend the afternoon pounding away at his typewriter, then in the evening, feeling he had earned it, he would venture into the hectic Manhattan social scene of which he was a main attraction for the city’s literati. Truman was a raconteur of some reputation, a year after the huge success of his seminal novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he was still the life and soul of any cocktail party. The autumn leaves were, even though the chill of winter was in the air, still carpeting the wide sidewalk outside his townhouse, blown from the elms across the street in Central Park, they crunched under his leather slippers as he escaped outside into the cold momentarily to retrieve his copy of the New York Times from his doorstep. He filled the moka espresso pot with finely ground coffee beans before putting it over the electric stove in the huge, well used kitchen which lead out onto the back patio. The moka pot was not yet in fashion in America, Truman had picked up a taste for the strong espresso of the Mediterranean on a writing holiday the previous summer. During a trip to Lake Como he had brought back the aluminium pot with the intention of using it as an after dinner talking point more than a kitchen utensil, but found it far more useful than he had imagined and now used it every morning, the gurgling sound becoming a regular accompaniment as he scanned the front page of the morning paper, still too sleepy to make any sense of what he was reading. He sipped the coffee slowly as he stared out the back window, into the garden, still smiling about the anecdotes he could recall from the party the previous night, the fuzzy hangover slowly evaporating as the warm coffee hugged his stomach.
He then went back upstairs and spent five minutes taking a shower and twenty minutes choosing a suit. When he returned downstairs he selected a record from the collection in the lounge, and settled into his favourite leather chair to the sound of one of Chopin’s piano sonatas and began reading the Times in earnest. It was a slow news day in New York; the front page was dominated with a volcano eruption in Hawaii, describing flaming hot jets of lava flying 200 feet through the air. Truman’s eyes scanned the rest of the news section half-heartedly; the book review section was his favourite part of the paper, which he liked to savour along with his morning toast and French marmalade. However there was one news story that caught his eye, a 300 word, single column news article with no by-line on page sixteen with a small passport sized photo of a Kansas farmer, Herbert Clutter who had been killed in a home invasion along with the rest of his family. The first paragraph of the news report read;
“Holcomb, Kan. (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.”
The man was found dead in the basement of his home, the rest of the family; his wife, son and daughter had been killed in their beds with shotgun blasts to the head. The house was in the middle of nowhere in a part of Kansas that most people even in Kansas had not heard of. Holcomb was a place as alien to Manhattan as anywhere in the English speaking world could be, and yet Truman felt an instant connection, a spark inside his brain touched his soul and he instinctively reached for the telephone.
His previous works of non-fiction had been very diverse, the only common theme among his writing being an exploration of humanity, a comment on the human condition. This story was right up his street, an exploration of violence and death, the most extreme expression of evil in a small farming community where nothing ever happens.
He looked at his watch, 9:15; the editor of The New Yorker magazine, William Shawn would just be sitting down at his desk, hopefully reading the same news story, if he rang him now he could catch him before his secretary brought in the Monday mail and the hectic work commitments of an editor would prevent him from taking the call from Truman. Although the two men were friends, Truman was a difficult, often demanding writer whose personality was almost the polar opposite to Shawn’s quiet and terribly shy nature. In fact Shawn was so shy that a rumour persisted around the office that he never took the elevator so as not to be forced to make small talk (in reality he never took the elevator due to his debilitating claustrophobia, another rumour which followed him was that he carried a hatchet in his briefcase in case he ever became trapped in a tight space).
Luckily, Shawn was at his desk and picked up the phone on the first ring.
“I know what I want to write about.” Truman said, forgoing any salutation. It had been some time since Truman had last written for the magazine, a gap of several months, and the two men were in a long running exchange as to the subject of Truman’s next writing project.
“Really? What is it?” Shawn asked, the excitement in his voice was almost enough to cut through the gloom of his Monday morning atmosphere in the office.
“Turn to page sixteen of today’s Times, the family killed in Kansas. I want to write about that. About the people in the small town; see how they’re coping with the tragedy.”
“Ok, when do you leave?”
“I’m getting the next train.” Truman replied, before hanging up by placing his index finger on the phone base, the receiver still in his hand, resting against his cheek. The next call he made was to Harper Lee, the writer who was soon to find fame on her own merit as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. She would join Truman on his journey to Kansas as his research assistant. It wasn’t a case that Truman needed an assistant in order to write the story, she would act as more of a buffer between him and the townspeople, Truman anticipated that the community of small minds and large gardens might not be too receptive to his extremely camp, almost aggressively homosexual demeanor hidden behind a high-pitched, childlike voice. If nothing else, Harper Lee would serve as good company and a drinking partner in a town where the only bar didn’t open on the Sabbath.
Truman Capote and Harper Lee arrived in Holcomb the day after the murder was first reported on the newswires. A press conference was hastily being arranged for the gathered media and interested townspeople who were desperate for information, a small town where everyone knew everyone else and their dog, that now spent their nights behind the locked doors of their homes with farm shotguns, fearing a brutal killer who was still on the loose.
The press conference was tense, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation's lead detective on the case, Alvin Dewey stood up and declared that they had little more information than the reporters themselves had, only that they were offering a cash reward for information from the public leading to an arrest. Truman Capote took an immediate liking to Dewey; a noble man of purpose, who took pride in his word and was now faced with a monumental challenge which he refused to shy away from. He was almost like a stock character from a detective novel; hard nosed, intelligent and driven.
In fact, the entire case was perfect for a paperback pulp novel that could be churned out in a week once all the facts had been collected; but Capote saw beyond the small town, beyond the violence, beyond the stock characters…this was real life, not just a 300 word article on page sixteen of the Times. The story would require a different approach than had been used in the past; Capote would have to rewrite the reportage rulebook. He immediately rang William Shawn;
“There’s too much here, it’s more than a thousand word story, it has to be a book.”

Part 2
That was 1959, the book In Cold Blood would not be finished until 1965. It was first published in four parts in The New Yorker beginning in September of that year. The murder case itself had not taken nearly that long to solve, Detective Dewey, true to his stock character, pursued the case with ruthless determination and the murderers were caught in less than three months.
Dick Hickock and Perry Smith looked like trouble. Anyone who saw them coming would cross the street to avoid them; both were muscular, with tough, beaten features and tattoos down each arm. Hickock was a common thug, who was destined to end up in prison from the day he was born. Perry Smith on the other hand, was soft spoken, with an air of intelligence and the soft hands of a philosopher. When Truman Capote first sat across a table from him, having bribed the prison warden and used the good name of The New Yorker for all it was worth to gain an audience with a killer, he knew his book would be special.
In a conversation with Harper Lee shortly after he started regular interviews with Perry Smith, who was now on death row alongside Hickock for their crime, Truman said of In Cold Blood that "Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe."
It was this inclination of how important In Cold Blood would be that drove Capote to keep working on the story; even after four years when after several appeals it looked like the killers might be set free. The major problem that kept getting in Capote’s way was that unless the killers were executed, he didn’t have an ending and would have to abandon the project, it needed that payoff. This is the major driving force behind the reason In Cold Blood is such an important book, and why it became the genesis of a whole new way of thinking when it came to reporting real life events.
In Cold Blood is an enigma. It is not a murder mystery, since the readers will already be familiar with the outcome, it is not a detective novel, since the events of the killers’ capture is so uneventful, nor is it a piece of straight journalism; the entire story could be satisfactorily reported in a five hundred word news article, In Cold Blood is a book about the details. It fills in the gaps between the facts. It looks at the story from all the angles, it examines the mundane happenings in everyday life that make the extraordinary events stand out.
The story is driven by violence, it is as brutal and unforgiving as the crimes it depicts, it’s a shock to the senses. It builds up a picture of the Clutter family, the murder victims, and their surroundings, every aspect of their life, it lets you inside their lives and then kills them right in front of you, lets you sit in the room while these people are shot in the face with a shotgun. Then it depicts the killers in every detail, shows you the person behind the mug shot, then sits you at the table with them before they feel the tension of the hangman’s noose against their throat, it lets you hear their final words, as well as the snapping of the rope.
It is a finely crafted exploration of our obsession with violence; it takes you by the hand like a child and introduces you to the real world like never before. The opening lines set the tone for the adventure, written in a slow, steady stroll:
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveller reaches them.”

This type of introduction is standard fare in any novel; it could be the start of an above average chick-lit paperback or the first foray into the great American novel. Before Capote hijacked the style and applied it to real life, this style was purely reserved for fiction, these days a similar paragraph could set the scene for a feature in a travel magazine, or a holiday diary piece in a Sunday broadsheet in any part of the English speaking world.
In Cold Blood was the reality television of its day, allowing the reader to observe real life from a fly on the wall perspective. In Cold Blood changed the way we write forever by spawning New Journalism.
In Cold Blood also started the controversy that dogs New Journalism to this day; the division of fact and fiction. The last scene in the book, describes Alvin Dewey, the KBI detective visiting the grave of the murdered family some years after the execution of their killers and his subsequent meeting there with Susan Kidwell, another major character in the story who was the first to find the bodies of the family, the two of them have a conversation about what has happened to them since the end of the trial. The scene is a neat ending to the story, incorporating several facts that give closure to the book and wrap the events in a neat package. The only problem with the scene is that it never actually happened. Capote never observed it happen, nor did Dewey recount the story to Capote. Capote simply invented the conversation as a means of relaying the events of the two characters lives since the tragedy. The argument from the perspective of Capote is that, it doesn’t really matter whether it happened or not, the major facts of the story were depicted accurately, some of the lesser facts were simply tidied up to make it fit the story better, the conversation may not have happened, the dialogue in the book may not have happened word for word…but equally, it might have. The earlier description of Capote making coffee in this chapter may not have happened, but it just as easily might have. The important thing is that the major facts and events were recounted.
Another criticism made against the book, particularly by Capote’s contemporary Tom Wolfe in his essay Pornoviolence, is that the book celebrates violence; it keeps the gory details of the killing till the end, lessening its journalistic integrity and slipping into the realm of pure fiction.
The term ‘New Journalism’ would not be used to describe In Cold Blood until much later of course, since the term had yet to be invented. The term ‘Non-fiction novel’ was used at the time to describe it. It was obvious right from the release of the book that it was different to everything that had come before. It used literary techniques such as montage, creative structures, dialogue, flashbacks, opinion (the novel is an obvious opposition to the death penalty) and most controversially the leaving out of some facts, such as the other daughters in the family who had moved away from the family home before the murder are hardly mentioned in the book at all. An obvious difference to previous journalistic works is the sheer length and detail of the book, helped by the inclusion of innocuous detail in order to set the scene and subplots involving characters (or in this case, real people) who were not involved in the case.
One major difference between this and later works of New Journalism is that Capote himself never appears in the book, even though he was present throughout the trial and execution and interacts with the townspeople during the events, no doubt having an impact along the way, there is no mention of him in the book, nor does the book ever descend into a first person point of view, which would have surely been the easiest storytelling option for someone like Capote, an author who was previously best known for his works of fiction.
Although it is not as pure an example of New Journalism as later works, it is the true genesis of the genre, laying the groundwork for many writers, including modern journalists who still use In Cold Blood as a template.

















Chapter Four
The Strange and Terrible Saga
“But what is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.”- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

The same year that Truman Capote was putting the finishing touches to In Cold Blood, so too was another journalist on the other side of the country working on an ending to his own book, on a similar topic of violence and public obsession, a book which also took years to research and which would change the way we write forever. A book which would blur the lines between journalism and objectivity, between reportage and literature, between fact and fiction; this book was Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson.
Hell’s Angels, or Hell’s Angels: the Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs to give it the full title under which it was originally published, was the result of a year’s research conducted by Thompson during which he rode around the country on a motorcycle with a group of outlaw motorcycle gang members, observing them and interacting with them. Like In Cold Blood, Thompson’s book originally started off as a short article, a one thousand word assignment for The Nation magazine entitled Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders. Similar to Capote, when Thompson began his research, he immediately realized that the material was best served by using an unorthodox style of writing to report it and envisioned the birth of a book using a new style of journalism. In order to understand the genesis of the book, and where it fits into the history of New Journalism, we must look at the writer himself.
Unlike Capote, who did not have a college education or any formal journalism training, Thompson had earned his stripes working on some of the best publications in the country, including an early job as a copy boy for Time magazine. Thompson had a turbulent beginning to his career to say the least. After graduating high school in Louisville, Thompson was sentenced to sixty days in jail for being a passenger in a stolen car. Shortly after his release from prison, Thompson joined the Air Force. Thompson moved to New York and studied journalism and creative writing at Columbia University in New York while in the Air Force who paid for his tuition. Thompson edited the sport section of the Air Force base’s newspaper. In his spare time, Thompson used a typewriter to copy entire books of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, he would spend hours typing out the pages, trying to find the rhythm of the prose, and absorbing the writers’ styles. He was soon fired from Time for insubordination and resorted to working for the Middletown Daily Record in Middletown, New York. He was soon fired from his position there for damaging a vending machine in the office and arguing with a local restaurant owner who advertised with the paper.
Thompson left the Air Force in 1958 with an honourable discharge, his commanding officer, Col. William S. Evans, chief of information services wrote of him on his discharge papers that; "In summary, this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy, sometimes his rebellious and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members."
After the Air Force, Thompson moved to Puerto Rico to take a job with a sports magazine El Sportivo as a bowling correspondent, the magazine soon folded and Thompson found himself working for The San Juan Star English language newspaper as a reporter. After working for a number of other regional English language newspapers around South America, Thompson got married and returned to the United States and settled in Aspen, Colorado.
It was shortly after his return that he began work on Hell’s Angels, his erratic and unconventional experiences before settling in America as a full time features writer imparted Thompson with the necessary kills to develop his own unique style of reportage. His early obsession with Hemingway taught him the literary skills he would later use in his journalism. His rebellious nature gave him the free spirit necessary to invent his own style of journalism.
Although Hell’s Angels was printed after In Cold Blood, it is unlikely that Thompson would have picked up the New Journalism style from Capote given the fact that Hell’s Angels would have taken so long to research and write and the major differences in the writing style. The fact the two books were written independently of each other supports the theory that a new style of journalism was required to report on the changing America of the sixties.
The themes of Hell’s Angels, which touch on alcohol, violence, drugs and sex hint at Thompson’s developing style which, as we’ll see in later chapters, will soon turn into Gonzo, a branch of New Journalism in its own right. As previously discussed, Hell’s Angels owes much of its style to Kerouac’s On the Road and many of its themes have already been explored in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The themes of counterculture and freedom in the book are something which is a direct reaction to the staleness of ‘straight’ reporting, in fact in several scenes throughout the book, the Hell’s Angels characters actively rebel and disrupt ‘straight’ reporters and journalists who attempt to report on the emergence of the 60’s biker gangs. In many ways, the New Journalism style that Thompson develops throughout the book is directly related to the story and themes within the book, although this is not directly touched upon.
Unlike In Cold Blood, which begins as it means to continue, with a constant, unwavering prose style, it can be argued that Hell’s Angels is erratic and changing as the book progresses, almost evolving, mutating from straight reportage in the beginning chapters, using similar styles and language to the features Thompson would have written for any national newspaper or magazine and gradually changing until by the end, the new style of writing is fully formed in the final chapters. This transition is done in such a gradual manner, almost as if the longer Thomson spends with the Angels, the bigger the departure from ‘straight’ journalism. The book begins with detailed descriptions of the motorcycle riders, intertwined with long quotes from newspaper and magazine articles about the Angels, followed by a long and detailed discussion of an official police report issued about the Angels.
Then something major happens, a shift in the direction of the book, as well as the journalistic style, the commentary which before had been in the form of a historical third person narrative, shifts to a first person viewpoint, Thompson himself begins to recount his own experiences. Page 46 sees the first use of the word ‘I’;
“I bought a big motorcycle and began riding around San Francisco and the East bay. The bike was a sleek factory-style B.S.A., bearing no aesthetic resemblance to the outlaw Harley, and my primary road garb was a tan sheepherder’s jacket, the last thing a Hell’s Angel might wear.”
Here Thompson puts himself right at the centre of the action, speaking about his motorcycle the same way he described the bikes of the Angels earlier in the book, this breaks one of the cardinal rules of journalism, breaking the boundary between the subject and the reporter, removing any sense of objectivity. Thompson is making it clear that he intends being a part of this story, that the book is not only going to be about the Hell’s Angels, but it will also be about him, the journalist’s experience in getting the story. An aspect of a news story which had been totally absent up until this point in journalistic history. This is the major difference which sets Thompson’s work apart from most other writers of New Journalism, when you read an account of an event written by Thompson, it will include his thoughts and opinions. Ten pages after ‘I’ first appears, it appears again, this time, seeming right at home;
“When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. We played Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterwards I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice.”
This paragraph, although it tells us a little more about the type of people the Angels are, mainly serves to develop the character of the journalist, Thompson himself, into the story.
In a way, what Thompson is doing is knocking down the wall which previously existed between subject and reporter, eliminating the façade of objectivity which all journalists use. Thompson is actually embracing the element that exists in every news story, namely that there is a journalist there observing it. The great physicist Erwin Schrödinger put forward the theory of scientific observation in 1935 that by observing a subject or experiment, you are interfering with the results, which in journalistic terms simply means that a subject which a reporter is trying to document will act differently merely because of the presence of a journalist. What Thompson is doing, and in the process, creating one of the founding principals of New Journalism, is embracing this fact that he is involved in the story instead of trying to hide it. By influencing the story directly, you can observe what happens more accurately. Later, with the advent of Gonzo, Thompson would actively seek out to influence or change news and current events and report on the results, such as in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, what we are seeing in Hell’s Angels is the genesis of this technique, whereby all semblance and pretence of objectivity is abandoned and the journalist throws themselves head first into the centre of the story. Towards the end of the book, the breakdown of the relationship between Thompson and the Angels becomes the story itself, where an argument and altercation breaks out due to the belief amongst the Angels that Thompson is making profit from them by writing about them without giving them a fair cut.
What Hell’s Angels and In Cold Blood would do in the following few short years after their publication in the mid sixties, would pave the way for more writers to experiment with the new tool of reportage; New Journalism. As we’ll see in the next chapter however, the man who revolutionized the genre, Hunter S. Thompson was about to take New Journalism one step further and mutate it even further, bending its new rules to suit his needs.








Chapter Five
Fear and Loathing
“Exaggeration of every kind is essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher, 1778-1860

By 1970, Hunter S. Thompson had honed his writing style into something which was almost totally alien to what he had learned in any journalism class, instead relying on his own twisted logic and internal moral compass as a measure of objectivity. His style would feature long, rambling stream of conscience departures from the story at hand which would feature fantastical and drug crazed rants and hallucinations which had much more in common with the fiction of William Burroughs than any journalistic endeavors which had come before. Instead of reporting on stories or assignments with a definite and measurable objective, such as following the Hell’s Angels and documenting their lives, he would instead focus on fantastical, grandiose subjects such as the search for the ‘American dream’ a theme which would dominate much of his work during the seventies (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved). Politics would begin to feature heavily in his work, often purporting radical and extreme views.
In 1970 Thompson ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on the ‘Freak Power’ ticket which stood for legalizing drugs and replacing the roads with pedestrian grassy walkways. Regularly appearing drunk and on drugs at political debates, Thompson shaved his head and referred to the Republican candidate as “my long haired opponent”. The election came to be called “The Battle of Aspen” by Thompson, who started writing features about the election in Rolling Stone, this was to begin his long relationship with the magazine, he would later become their chief political editor after loosing the election even though he gained 44% of the votes.
Later in that same year, Scanlan’s Monthly, a short lived magazine which specialized in New Journalism hired Thompson, a highly experienced sports reporter, to cover the Kentucky Derby. The resulting piece, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, was a piece of seminal sports journalism which featured nothing at all about the race, the horses or the jockeys. The piece was accompanied by the warning;
“SPECIAL NOTE: Parental discretion advised for this article, as it is rated R. It includes adult language, references to drug and alcohol abuse, and other generalizations and behavior which readers might find quite shocking.”

Instead of sport, the piece focused on Thompson’s efforts to cover the race while falling down drunk and taking copious amounts of drugs, as well as his interactions with the other race goers and Ralph Steadman, an artist who was also assigned to the story by Scanlan’s, to illustrate Thompson’s piece. Steadman and Thompson would end up working together on many of Thompson’s seminal Gonzo articles and books. Much of the article, as with a great deal of Thompson’s New Journalism work, deals with the difficulties of trying to cover an event while being drunk and disorganized;
“The next day was heavy. With only thirty hours until post time I had no press credentials and--according to the sports editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal--no hope at all of getting any. Worse, I needed two sets: one for myself and another for Ralph Steadman, the English illustrator who was coming from London to do some Derby drawings. All I knew about him was that this was his first visit to the United States. And the more I pondered the fact, the more it gave me fear. How would he bear up under the heinous culture shock of being lifted out of London and plunged into the drunken mob scene at the Kentucky Derby? There was no way of knowing. Hopefully, he would arrive at least a day or so ahead, and give himself time to get acclimated. Maybe a few hours of peaceful sightseeing in the Bluegrass country around Lexington. My plan was to pick him up at the airport in the huge Pontiac Ballbuster I'd rented from a used-car salesman name Colonel Quick, then whisk him off to some peaceful setting that might remind him of England.”

The article was not widely read at the time, but it was later reprinted in several publications and fastened Thompson’s reputation as a writer of immense talent. The piece marked the beginning of Gonzo journalism, the term ‘Gonzo’ to describe this style of New Journalism was coined by Bill Cardoso, the editor of The Boston Globe at the time who declared upon reading the article that "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." Gonzo was an old fashioned term used among the South Boston Irish community used to describe the only person who was left standing after an extended session of heavy drinking.
From then on the term ‘Gonzo’ stuck and everything that Thompson wrote in the style of the Derby piece came under that term. Thompson would use this style of writing to craft his seminal work of New Journalism a year later. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came about when Thompson took a job for Sports Illustrated magazine to travel to Las Vegas to write a 250 word article to accompany some pictures they were to receive from the Mint 400, a desert race for motorcycles and jeeps which took place every year in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas. As the race was well known to attract decadence and depravity, Thompson saw it as an ideal opportunity to push his new found New Journalism technique to the limit.
The resulting series of four 10,000 word articles which would appear serialized in Rolling Stone would catapult Thompson to fame and his work to the forefront of modern journalism.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream to give it its full title, tells the story of the character Raul Duke, Thompson’s alter ego and his lawyer, referred to as Dr. Gonzo in the book and their attempt to find the American dream. The result is a savage critique of American society at the time, incorporating politics, sexuality, drugs, the decline of hippie culture and the failings of the justice system, all told through the haze of a myriad of drink and drugs.
The book used a vast array of literary techniques, sometimes including unedited notes and transcripts of recorded conversations, as well as long, rambling fantasies, hallucinations and internal monologues.
Unlike Thompson’s previous book, the journalistic merit is less clear cut, however it is the comment on the entire journalistic process of chasing the story, the ultimate story as Thompson sees it, of the American dream. Again, like Hell’s Angels, the character of the journalist takes centre stage, becoming the main focal point of the story. The book is the purest form of Gonzo journalism, which aims to find clarity in excess, in the end the characters realize that the American dream has ultimately escaped them.
Similar themes prevail in Thompson’s next book, also first appearing in Rolling Stone in serialized form. Fear and Loathing on the CampaignTrail ’72 is a collection of articles Thompson wrote while covering the 1972 Democratic party primaries in the run up to the 1972 United States presidential campaign. The book covers an entire twelve month period of every aspect of the campaign, starting in a small apartment in Washington, to the larger democratic rallies and campaign speeches. Although the flashes of drunken madness are still present as with Thompson’s earlier work, this book also displays Thompson’s gift as one of the keenest political observers at that time in America, the book is now a standard text in many politics classes in American universities. As well as possessing a keen eye for politics, Thompson also displays a sharp sense of the state of journalism in America at the time, criticising many of the journalists working alongside him on the campaign for giving the candidates a free ride, realizing that a healthy media was an integral part of a healthy democracy. Thompson criticises the ‘pack journalism’ of the other reporters who simply use the information given to them by the candidates instead of doing their own leg work.
Thompson’s use of New Journalism techniques; dialogue, literary description, hyperbole and fantasy allowed Thompson far more scope than the other broadsheet newspaper reporters who were also working the campaign, allowing him to incorporate traditional journalistic techniques which he learned early in his career with newer, edgier techniques he was pioneering as part of the New Journalism movement.




Chapter Six
Asides and lasting influence
“People shouldn’t expect the mass media to investigate news stories, that job belongs to the fringe media.”- Ted Koppel, winner of thirty seven Emmy Awards, six George Foster Peabody Awards and two Sigma Delta Chi Awards, the highest honor bestowed for public service by the Society of Professional Journalists.

It would be a mistake to suggest that the entire genre of New Journalism was created only by the major works cited above. There were many contributing influences. Although In Cold Blood and Hell’s Angels ignited the initial spark, in between the other landmark publications such as the works by Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer there were several other writers crafting small, groundbreaking articles that furthered the reach of New Journalism and kept the skills alive in the interim period between major books written in the new style.
Foremost amongst the architects of New Journalism is a feature writer named Gay Talese, a man whose works are all but forgotten in modern journalism courses. To celebrate their seventieth anniversary, Esquire magazine, which has seen some of the greatest writers of a generation grace its pages; from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William F. Buckley, named an article of New Journalism by Talese written in 1963 as the greatest Esquire article in the magazine’s history, calling Frank Sinatra Has a Cold as the "Best Story Esquire Ever Published."
The article is a profile of the legendary singer which was published in 1963. The article is noteworthy because it is considered to be the greatest ever profile of a celebrity…even though the journalist never got a chance to interview the subject due to Sinatra being ill, hence the title. Talese was able to interview those surrounding Sinatra and his family, but not the man himself. In order to write the article, Talese was forced to take drastic measures and use literary and story telling techniques in order to fill the gaps in the resulting story. Observing the crooner across a packed barroom, the writer was forced to use the New Journalism techniques of literary narrative, dialogue intertwined with hyperbole, with a touch of fantasy and humour in order to plug the holes in the article;
“Sinatra with a cold is like Picasso without paint, a Ferrari without fuel--only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.”
Sinatra was approaching his fiftieth birthday and artists like The Beatles were threatening his position as the number one performer in the U.S, the feel of the piece had to be right, it had to be accurate and well measured, while entertaining at the same time. The resulting piece was later cited by Sinatra himself as his favourite article about him.
The article ended with a scene that didn’t actually happen…but it could have, all Talese was doing was filling in the gaps;
“Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it?
Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone.”
Gay Talese was to write another feature for Esquire later that same year, another profile, this time about Joe Louis the heavyweight boxer entitled Joe Louis: the King as a Middle-aged Man. The article again featured the same mix of fact written like fiction. People started to take notice this time, people like fellow writer Tom Wolfe, who wrote in an article in New York magazine in 1972 which was to coin the term ‘New Journalism’, written in an appropriate style. The following passage describes Wolfe’s first encounter with a New Journalism article;
“What inna namea Christ is this—in the fall of 1962 I happened to pick up a copy of Esquire and read a story called "Joe Louis: the King as a Middle-aged Man." The piece didn't open like an ordinary magazine article at all. It opened with the tone and mood of a short story, with a rather intimate scene; or intimate by the standards of magazine journalism in 1962, in any case:
" 'Hi, sweetheart!' Joe Louis called to his wife, spotting her waiting for him at the Los Angeles airport.
"She smiled, walked toward him, and was about to stretch up on her toes and kiss him—but suddenly stopped.
" 'Joe,' she said, 'where's your tie?'
" 'Aw, sweetie,' he said, shrugging, 'I stayed out all night in New York and didn't have time—'
" 'All night!' she cut in. 'When you're out here all you do is sleep, sleep, sleep.'
" 'Sweetie,' Joe Louis said, with a tired grin, 'I'm an ole man.'
" 'Yes,' she agreed, 'but when you go to New York you try to be young again.' "
The story featured several scenes like that, showing the private life of a sports hero growing older, balder, sadder. It wound up with a scene in the home of Louis's second wife, Rose Morgan. In this scene Rose Morgan is showing a film of the first Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight to a roomful of people, including her present husband.
"Rose seemed excited at seeing Joe at the top of his form, and every time a Louis punch would jolt Conn, she'd go, 'Mummm' (sock). 'Mummm' (sock). 'Mummm.'
"Billy Conn was impressive through the middle rounds, but as the screen flashed Round 13, somebody said, 'Here's where Conn's gonna make his mistake; he's gonna try to slug it out with Joe Louis.' Rose's husband remained silent, sipping his Scotch.
"When the Louis combinations began to land, Rose went, 'Mummmmm, mummmmm,' and then the pale body of Conn began to collapse against the canvas.
"Billy Conn slowly began to rise. The referee counted over him. Conn had one leg up, then two, then was standing—but the referee forced him back. It was too late.
"—and then, for the first time, from the back of the room, from out of the downy billows of the sofa, comes the voice of the present husband—this Joe Louis crap again—
" 'I thought Conn got up in time,' he said, 'but that referee wouldn't let him go on.'
"Rose Morgan said nothing—just swallowed the rest of her drink."
What the hell is going on? With a little reworking the whole article could have read like a short story. The passages in between the scenes, the expository passages, were conventional 1950s-style magazine journalism, but they could have been easily recast. The piece could have been turned into a non-fiction short story with very little effort. The really unique thing about it, however, was the reporting. This I frankly couldn't comprehend at first. I really didn't understand how anyone could manage to do reporting on things like the personal by-play between a man and his fourth wife at an airport and then follow it up with that amazing cakewalk down Memory Lane in his second wife's living room. My instinctive, defensive reaction was that the man had piped it, as the saying went . . . winged it, made up the dialogue . . . Christ, maybe he made up whole scenes, the unscrupulous geek . . . The funny thing was, that was precisely the reaction that countless journalists and literary intellectuals would have over the next nine years as the New Journalism picked up momentum. The bastards are making it up! (I'm telling you, Ump, that's a spitball he's throwing . . .) Really stylish reporting was something no one knew how to deal with, since no one was used to thinking of reporting as having an aesthetic dimension.

It was this style which would form the basis of Tom Wolfe’s criteria for New Journalism; a factual report, written like a short story.
Tom Wolfe himself would also unwittingly play a small part in the founding of New Journalism. In 1963 after being sent by Byron Dobell, the then editor of Esquire to write an article about the underground world of custom cars, Wolfe suffered a severe case of writers block and, unsure how to approach writing the article, sent a letter to Dobell outlining his ideas and including some notes on the custom car scene with scant regard for the protocol of letter etiquette or journalistic merit…Dobell simply removed the words ‘Dear Dobell’ from atop the page and printed the letter as a feature entitled The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, the article received such positive feedback from readers that Wolfe immediately saw the benefits of this ‘new type of journalism’, a type of factual story with the aesthetic of fiction. Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson would find the style themselves and appropriate it, using it to write some of the most important pieces of journalism ever written, and the rest is history.

It’s the aesthetic of the story, the way it flows, not just the literary techniques used that qualify a story as New Journalism.
If you were to pick up any magazine on a newsagents’ shelf today, chances are that contained within the pages would be several examples of New Journalism techniques; the movie magazine with the interview with a film star that begins “My stomach was in knots as I waited in the hotel lobby to interview Robert DeNiro…” or the war reporter describing being shelled the previous night; “As the Afghan mortars rained down on us, I could hear their thunderous roars and see the flashes of light interrupt the starry night like lightning…”… the reporter taking centre stage in the story, filling in the gaps with hyperbole and creative narratives, all techniques which were pioneered by a few well-timed pieces of New Journalism.









Bibliography
• Burroughs, William, Naked Lunch, Harper, 2002
• Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood, Penguin Classics, 2000.

• Clarke, Gerald, Capote: A Biography, Carroll & Graf, 2005

• Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, Penguin Classics, 2003

• Simpson, John, A Mad World, My Masters, Pan Books, 2001.
• Thompson, Hunter S., Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Flamingo Modern Classic, 1993.
• Thompson, Hunter S., Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Flamingo Modern Classic, 1999.
• Thompson, Hunter S., Hell’s Angels, Penguin Classics, 2003.
• Whitmer, Peter O., When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, Hyperion, 1993.
• Wolfe, Tom, The Birth of 'The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report, February 14, 1972 issue of New York Magazine (online edition).