Dimensions
155 x 235 x 25mm
Throughout the 1960s and 70s a strange and eclectic gang of writers re-wrote journalism and changed the way we read about the world. Along the way they produced some of the great classics of twentieth-century literature, including: In Cold Blood, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Right Stuff Armies of the Night, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Their authors - Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer - are also acknowledged as some of America's greatest twentieth-century writers. But they wrote non-fiction, not novels, about big subjects like Vietnam, the Hippie culture, notorious murders, the space programme, and the strange and terrible saga of the American dream. The then revolutionary new brand of non-fiction they pioneered - narrative and novelistic, yet documentary and often with a spaced-out, forensic detachment - has now become part of the mainstream.
Marc Weingarten's book tells for the first time how the New Journalism pushed reportage beyond its narrow limits and changed the literary culture, and the fascinating stories behind the research and writing of books such as In Cold Blood.
