Works by Capote, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer are often thought to typify New Journalism. Their work has received more attention from literary critics as well as journalists than any of their peers. Capote and Mailer, however, did not call their work journalism. Capote called In Cold Blood a "nonfiction novel." Mailer subtitled Armies of the Night "History as a Novel. The Novel as History." If the word "journalism" had never been applied to these works, they might have gone uncriticized by journalists, just as Twain's and Hemingway's creative nonfiction had. They would certainly have been criticised less. Nonetheless, they were caught up in New Journalism. Wolfe believed that the two novelists had avoided calling their work journalism because they didn't want to get their hands dirty with a form of writing looked down upon by the literary upper crust. In the hierarchy of prose, wrote Wolfe:

Wolfe thought Capote and Mailer "had a dread of the tag... --journalists" (28). Nevertheless, in the cases of both Capote and Mailer, wrote Wolfe, "here was another novelist who had turned to some form of accursed journalism, no matter what name you gave it" (28). In view of the controversy which arose from New Journalism, much of which centered on the word "journalism," designating a term for the "new" nonfiction of writers such as Mailer and Capote was not so simple a Wolfe implied.

Rather than considering their work a "third way to tell a story" (Connery, 1990, 3), the New Journalists set their work up as better than both mainstream journalism and modern fiction. Wolfe, for example, declared that New Journalism would overtake fiction as "literature's main event" (1973, 9). The term New Journalism itself implies a haughty disregard for the "old" journalism. It implies that the "new" is here to replace the worn out and flawed "old." Most of the New Journalists paid relatively little attention to the relationship between conventional journalism and New Journalism. Many scholars who considered the work of the New Journalists often did so on the defensive, with an idea of defending journalism or defending fiction in mind.

Journalists often cited Capote, Wolfe and Mailer as examples of how New Journalism was not journalism. Critics asserted that rather than use the devices of literature to expand journalism, the New Journalists aimed to "draw literary effect from nonfiction materials, to render literature from reporting, art from fact" (Berner, 7). They were artists rather than journalists. Their desire in relating the events that they had witnessed or researched was not so much to reflect the events as to represent their own creative visions.

Capote's own term for his book, "nonfiction novel," seems an appropriate description of the work. It designates the deliberately artistic direction of the work, which is arranged in regard to dramatic effect or to a creative goal of the author. At the same time, it identifies the work's solid base in fact. Some critics, including John Hersey, found the idea of a nonfiction novel "appallingly harmful," because it blurred the boundaries between "fiction and journalism." Hersey feared the term implied that "there is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there is only narrative" (1980, 290). Certainly, the word "novel" implies fiction, but some novels are more fictional than others. The historical novel has a made-up plot but is carefully framed within a particular time period and based on research. The characters in such a story may be historical figures, the portrayal of whom are also based on research. A historical novel, thus, is not taken completely as fiction. In a nonfiction novel, the author takes the research a few steps further. Everything is real, all the characters and the plot. However, the author has not just documentation in mind, but has an artistic goal as well.

Not only was there a dispute whether or not to call In Cold Blood journalism, but also one as to whether it could even be called nonfiction. Though Capote claims the book is "immaculately factual," some critics insist that it "is radically inaccurate" (Heyne, 481). Philip K. Tompkins researched the events upon which the book is based and, in an article entitled "In Cold Fact," detailed the discrepancies of fact he found in Capote's account. Though many of Capote's departures from fact may have been accidental, claimed Tompkins, at the very least he had at times "put his own observations into the mouths and minds of other characters" (qtd. by Heyne, 481). Most significantly, Capote was charged with sentimentalizing the killer Perry Smith, turning him into a sort of prophet and victim of society. For example, in the following scene the killers, Perry and Dick, are on the run. They have picked up a couple hitchhikers, an old man and a young boy. Dick is afraid the old man will die on them and wants to put them out. An argument ensues:

Some have suggested that the title of the book, In Cold Blood, refers not to the slaughter of the Kansas farm family, but to the execution of Perry Smith. Tompkins wrote:

Nonetheless one can assume that whatever elements of the story Capote might have made up, added to or exaggerated, he did so under the rationale that it was true to the story, if not exactly true to life. Was this idea part of what Capote meant when he said the work was "immaculately factual?" It is certainly not what most people would consider pure fact. Varying concepts of what makes a fact are a central issue to literary journalism. If Tompkins' claims are true, Capote seems to have had a different concept of a fact than, say, Tompkins. Capote might have pieced together a dialogue based on what he thought had probably happened and considered it as likely to be true as any testimony he may have gathered through interviews. Perhaps it was. A more traditional idea of immaculately factual, however, would be confined to only information that was actually gathered. Also typical of journalism is verification of information. If two people remember a conversation they had with one another and generally agree on what was said, it would seem legitimate to reconstruct that conversation. If, however, the author made up a conversation based on what he thought must have been said, most readers would probably consider it fictional, or at least other than journalism. Capote might argue that based on the extent of his research (5 years-worth) he was qualified to take such an imaginative, though educated, step, and to do so was not making things up but putting facts together, adding up the numbers.

A fitting comparison to In Cold Blood is John Hersey's book Hiroshima, which recounts the experiences of six survivors of the first Atomic bomb attack. Hersey's dramatic reconstruction of events, which was published twenty years before Capote's book, is probably closer to the accepted conception of immaculately factual. Hersey also became one of the New Journalists' sharpest critics. He was troubled by the degree to which some of the New Journalists strayed from what he believed was necessarily the base of the genre, journalism. "I have always believed that the devices of fiction could serve journalism well and might even help it to aspire now and then to the level of art" (290). However, he said, citing works from Wolfe, Capote and Mailer, in much of the New Journalism "the fictionist decidedly had the upper hand over the journalist" (291).

Like Capote, Hersey based Hiroshima on numerous interviews and extensive research. He did not take the additional step toward creation, which he believed Capote was guilty of. Hersey stuck painstakingly to fact. That, he would probably say, is what journalism is all about. The issue of credibility was always on his mind and is expressed in the writing. Though Hersey wrote descriptively, each detail appears to have been "meticulously documented" and "gleaned from close observation and careful research" (Jones, 215). Writing in an almost clinical style, Hersey wanted to let the story speak for itself. Practically every sentence seems as though it was based on a question directly asked to one of the survivors, as if he had asked "What did you think, see, feel, smell and hear?" of every moment after the blast. For example, the book begins:

Hersey's narrative was conceived entirely to serve the subject and to serve journalism. His goal was to put the story into a form that was comprehensive and vivid, yet still as credible as the best journalism. Hersey was not interested in exploring a new literary medium, but in doing justice to a tremendous event. This meant to write descriptively, but also precisely; part of doing justice to the story was writing it so that it would be believed.

The "literary" aspect of Hiroshima appears in Hersey's chronological scene-by-scene structuring of the events but primarily in his concentration on details that bring the sense and image of the event to the mind his readers. In this scene, for instance, a day or two after the blast, a German missionary, who had taken refuge from the fires following the explosion in a park on the city's outskirts with thousands of others, returned to the city to assess the damage to his mission:

In uncovering details like these --the pumpkins and potatoes cooked by the atomic fires and the concentration on individuals-- that Hersey finds a way to allow the story to speak for itself.

Hersey was careful to keep his fingerprints off of his work in most ways, but he deliberately depicts a group of people in Hiroshima atypical of the city's population. Of the six persons whose tale he chronicles, two were doctors, though the city of about 250,000 had only 150 doctors, and two were Christian clergy members, though less than one percent of the city belonged to that faith. Hersey chose his subjects so that his American readers could relate to them. "The very qualities that make Hersey's survivors atypical of Japanese culture make them recognizable and even sympathetic to American readers" (Jones, 215). Hersey arranged his reconstruction of the Hiroshima bomb blast with reference to his readers' understanding. His motive was, in short, "to translate the reality of the bomb into terms that are not alien to western habits of mind, while declining to either justify or condemn its use" (216).

What was Capote's goal in writing In Cold Blood? Most likely, it was to provide insight into a bizarre phenomenon that has become a too common occurrence in American society. Capote probably aimed to show how such a brutal and seemingly senseless killing occurs and to offer a psychological profile of the murderers, whose violent lives must reflect back on the society from which they came. But there was also the novelistic component of the nonfiction novel. Capote took creative steps that Hersey did not. He altered the story to enhance its complexities, to emphasize what he saw as its most intriguing issues. By making Perry Smith a deeper and more introspective person than he was, Capote accentuates the moral issues of, among other things, the death penalty. Capote wanted In Cold Blood to reflect upon issues larger than the single event, of conditions within society, and he shaped is material to achieve this end. His shaping of information followed his goal.

Hersey's goal was to represent precisely a single occurrence. He resisted allowing himself too much creative leeway for the sake of the goal. He thought Capote's goal should have been closer to his own and wrote:

Those interested in journalism may have criticized Capote for embellishing fact, but he was also criticised by some literary critics for not letting go more with his creative pen. Such critics asserted that his insistence on sticking to fact resulted in a wooden narrative. "Mr. Capote is a dramatist, but what he has put together here is a meticulous, long-winded, often tedious, always synthetic chronicle... I think his time would have been better spent had he exercised the freedom of a dramatist" (Weeks, 1966).

Probably, in writing In Cold Blood, Capote aimed to place his work somewhere on the spectrum between the criticisms of both the journalists and the literary critics. He wanted it to be factually precise enough for his work to be generally accepted as nonfiction, yet be creative and colorful enough to emulate the feel of a novel. By most accounts, he succeeded. Despite the claims of unreliability, even Tompkins conceded, "we must still believe in the essential authenticity and integrity of Capote's account" (qtd. by Heyne, 482).

* * *

Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night recounts the author's involvement in 1967 peace march on the Pentagon. One reviewer wrote:

Nevertheless, Armies of the Night is primarily about Mailer himself. It is "mostly a character study of Mailer" (Puzo, 877). In this pursuit, the book is an experiment --both in autobiography and in journalism. More so than even Capote, Mailer is exploring nonfiction as a new artistic realm. He does not use literary techniques to serve journalism, as Hersey did; rather, he uses nonfiction to serve literature. Like Capote, Mailer constructs his nonfictional story with a creative vision as a blueprint. Also like Capote, he did not call his work journalism. Armies of the Night is subtitled "History as a Novel. The Novel as History." The term "novel," I think, indicates the work's emphasis on aesthetics. It is a self-consciously artistic work.

An autobiographical element is common to literary journalism, however Mailer focuses more on "Mailer" (he refers to himself in the third person throughout the work) than on the march. He takes the reader beyond his immediate feelings about the event to explore how it fit into the rest of his life. He uses the march to develop the character of Mailer. For instance, in this scene, "Mailer" has just been arrested after "transgressing a police line." The whole time he is being carted away by a couple MPs, a man making a documentary about him is filming, as are TV-news reporters:

As is evident in this passage, Mailer often exposes his personal thoughts and feelings in Armies of the Night. One reviewer described Mailer's characterization of himself as "crueler than the classic Lillian Ross profile of Hemingway" (Puzo, 877).

Mailer's inclusion this kind of self-debasing autobiographical material may lead one to draw a parallel between Armies of the Night and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Both writers essentially erase all lines between themselves and their subjects, becoming co-subjects, in a sense. However, there is a significant distinction between the two works, and it has to do with their journalistic intent.

Agee was obsessed with his subject. His experience of the Alabama sharecroppers moved him deeply. He was committed to giving as true a picture of them as he was capable. He wanted to go beyond their apparent wretchedness and reveal a beauty he found in their spirit as well as their sheer existence. Agee, some critics thought, seemed to be "more concerned with God's creatures than God is" (Ashdown, 1992, 200). Agee revealed his own intensely personal reactions to the subject for two reasons: first, to show to the reader what was "peculiar and distorting in the recording instrument" (Hersey, 1988, 79); and to suggest to readers how they themselves might have been moved by the experience.

Certainly, Mailer shared somewhat in these same motives, but his primary concern was for his artistic experiment, "History as a Novel. The Novel as History." His personal revelations are made to develop the character of Mailer as he would for a character in a novel. The march on the Pentagon was a frame for his experiment, which was to see how a single event fit into an individual's life and into the society as a whole. Mailer was not obsessed with the peace march as much as he was with his creative idea. Too little of the work rests on the significance of the event. And too much of it depends on Mailer's fame.

* * *

Like Capote and Mailer, Tom Wolfe was engaged foremost in breaking new artistic ground. He believed that New Journalism arose as much from an inadequacy within modern fiction as from failings of mainstream journalism. According to Wolfe, contemporary novelists had abandoned realism in favor of "fable," "myth," and "fabulism" (1973, 39):

As Wolfe saw it, novelists had left a literary void. Depicting "the whole business of 'the way we live now'" was a literary necessity, he thought. Feature writers at a handful of New York magazines and newspapers, most of whom were aspiring novelists (7), sensed this empty space and realized that "it just might be possible to write journalism that would...read like a novel" (9). They recovered realism and the horizon was suddenly wide open. "The novelists had been kind enough to leave behind for our boys quite a nice little body of material: the whole of American society, in effect" (31).

Literature, rather than journalism, was Wolfe's touchstone. I don't mean simply the style of journalism, but its purpose. Wolfe was mostly interested not in improving journalism, but in making New Journalism better than modern fiction. As he said, "As I saw it, if a new literary style could originate in journalism, then it stood to reason that journalism could aspire to more than mere emulation of those aging giants, the novelists" (22). He thought, in fact, "that the work [the New Journalists] would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature's main event" (9).

Wolfe barely considered New Journalism's implications for journalism. All he said about modern journalism in The New Journalism was that it was boring:

That standard journalism is lifelessness is, of course, a legitimate gripe. Life is not dull; boring writing does not adequately document life. However, as I have attempted to address in this paper, there are more issues involved in adding a literary element to journalism than pumping up the style. The most important of these and the most relevant to Wolfe's work is the primacy of the subject, the relationship between the subject, the writer and his writing. Wolfe takes an artist's view of his subjects. They are raw material out of which he, the artist, makes something. The most common criticism of Wolfe was that he allowed his creative goals supersede his journalistic ones. "When Wolfe talks about finding 'artistic' excitement in journalism he has in mind one such strain --the effort to draw literary effect from nonfiction materials, to render literature from reporting, art from fact" (Berner, 7).

Wolfe wrote that "when one moves from newspaper reporting to this new form of journalism ...one discovers that the basic reporting unit is no longer the datum, the piece of information, but the scene." In response Thomas R. Berner wrote:

Berner takes Wolfe's statement as proof that he is primarily interested in drama. The scene is the basic unit of the novel. John Hersey, too, was a critic: "Wolfe is the paradigm of the would-be journalist who cannot resist the itch to improve on the material he digs up" (1980, 293).

Wolfe is known for meticulously researching his subjects, however he is also known for the signature excited voice he brings to much of his work:

Almost everything he writes is colored by his particular voice. One critic wrote that Wolfe's claim of journalistic accuracy "is like El Greco boasting about his photographic accuracy" (W. Sheed qtd. by Gold, 295). The great length to which Wolfe extolls "realism" in The New Journalism seems odd. He speaks so highly of the power of realism and of works by Gogol and Dickens, among other realists, yet in his own work, he hardly seems concerned with the kind of realism exemplified by any of the authors he mentions.

I think Wolfe wanted to find a voice and style that itself characterized what he wrote about. His frantic tone was the symbol of the urgent pitch of the 1960s' cultural revolution:

Wolfe sought to be the voice of the sixties, at least the part of it that he thought was most significant (i.e. changes in "manners and morals") -- in much the same way he became the spokesman for the New Journalism. He succeeded with certain subjects; youth culture was his specialty. With other subjects, however, rather than searching for its voice, he substituted his own. Hersey wrote of The Right Stuff, Wolfe's documentary of the Apollo Space Program, "What we hear throughout, ringing in every mind, is the excited shout of Tom Wolfe. Each astronaut in turn becomes Tom Wolfe...each astronaut's wife becomes Tom Wolfe" (1980, 298). Wolfe's subjects sometimes become "embedded in his own ego" (Arlen, 1974, 253). He seems to give up the task of revealing the subject, and turns instead to arranging it. Michael Arlen wrote, "Where I find the real failure in New Journalism, or in much of it anyway, is in the New Journalist's determination and insistence that we shall see life largely on his terms" (1974, 253). This criticism, I think, applies to some of Wolfe's work.

For instance, in "Radical Chic," Wolfe uses a literary device he calls "the downstage narrator" to cover a party given by Leonard Bernstein and his wife for the Black Panthers. Far from down being downstaged, Wolfe seems to press everything into a mold:

Anyone can appreciate the irony of a famous rich white couple throwing a fancy party for the Black Panthers. If ever a bit of sarcasm was in order, it could well have been in describing that party. But that's all Wolfe does here. He seems to sit in a chair alone in the corner of the room with his little notepad and a smirk on his face.

In a piece such as this, Wolfe makes "the reporter the center of interest rather than the real world he is supposed to be picturing or interpreting...The report becomes performance." (Hersey, 1980, 313) The interest in the report rests on Wolfe's literary antics. The real subject becomes his imagination (Gold, 295).

Wolfe was probably the most-criticised of the New Journalists, but he purposely drew attention to himself. Wolfe mocked his critics, among others. He obviously took pleasure in their indignation at his remarks. For example, in The New Journalism, he wrote of "the journalists and literati who were so furious" about New Journalism:

Often the main draw of a Tom Wolfe story is Tom Wolfe himself, his clever wit and flashing-neon writing. In a sense, he might be compared to Twain as a social commentator. I think Kurt Vonnegut pegged him pretty well in reviewing The Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Stream-Line Baby when he described Wolfe as "a genius who will do anything to get attention" (1369).

* * *

More than most of the New Journalists, Michael Herr discovered what literary journalism can do. His book Dispatches captures what was so frightening about the Vietnam War and what made it such a powerful national experience. Herr stepped away from conventional journalism to do what it could not.

The war in Vietnam was one of the one of the most significant events in American history. As the longest, most costly and most controversial war we ever fought, as well as the only war we ever lost, the Vietnam War was not just a matter of U.S. foreign policy. It was a rallying point and impetus for social and cultural change. Vietnam challenged the American consciousness, and to many of the soldiers who served there and even some of the news correspondents, it was shattering. Logic had a way of loosing meaning, and safety was never assured. One could never really tell when and from which direction one might be shot at or who would be holding the gun -- a child? the washer woman?

The American public was closer to the war in Vietnam, through television, than they had been to any other. The images of the war were very clear, yet the answer to the question "Why are we in Vietnam?" was never quite clear. Few people, whether they were TV viewers or the soldiers who had the cameras trained on them as they fought and died, could take much comfort in politics, in "stemming the spread of Communism," or in any certain morality of the action. Vietnam caused a national syndrome so acute that even more than two decades after the war's end, politicians and presidents evoke its powerful memory in their rhetoric. "The Persian Gulf will not be another Vietnam," President Bush repeated like a mantra in 1990 to calm the American public. Also, in recent years, the rallying cry against U.S. involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovinia has been, "It will be another quagmire like Vietnam."

Herr was a correspondent for Rolling Stone and Esquire. Unlike most correspondents, he did not have to rush to send daily reports back to New York. He did not have to drop what he was doing and run off to cover for-the-press affairs upon the order of an editor. As he said, "I never had to cover luncheons given for members of the Philippine Civic Action Group or laugh woodenly while the Polish delegate to the International Control Commission lobbed a joke on me" (188). Herr's assignment was vague. He had no deadlines. During the months he spent in country, he sent only one dispatch back to his editors. The rest of the book was written over a matter of years after the author's return to the States. With freedom of time and form, Herr unraveled his experience to reveal what has come to be recognized --both as a direct result of Dispatches and of the films it inspired, such as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now-- as the essence of the Vietnam War. The inconsolable terror, rock 'n roll, the wanton violence, drugs and all the insanity: at his best, Herr "hurls one into his experience," uninitiated and uncomforted" (Sale, 600).

To tell his story, Herr had to step away from standard journalism's style and approach. "Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it," he wrote. Like Agee and Orwell had, Herr found that an essential (if not the essential) dimension of the war's story was being ignored.

To make the suffering impressive, Herr had to do more than say it. There was a greater obstacle than language. Even to Herr himself, though he was there and saw it all with his own eyes, the war seemed unreal, like a movie. To tell it, he had to do more than look at it. He had to face it and break down the walls that protected him, as well as his readers, from the horrifying truth of it. In this sense, Herr had to get closer to the war than even the soldiers who were locked into it, who, unlike himself, couldn't leave if they wanted to. He had to let the war get close to him psychologically. As John Hellman wrote of Herr:

While most people would try to keep the nightmare of the war at least psychologically at arm's length, Herr had to let it inside of him. He let Vietnam get to him so that he could make it get to his readers. As he wrote, "I went to cover the war but the war covered me." Thus, the young writer himself becomes the reader's psychological guide to the war. He does not to profess to get into anyone's head other than his own (unlike other New Journalists), but his internal struggles with the fear of death and the terror of seeing so much killing around him provide a window to what everyone there must have felt and eloquently suggests to the reader what he too might have felt. Consider the following, for example:

While Dispatches is an intensely personal work, running the gamut from Herr's Saigon depressions to his nightmares, the book does not --despite an occasional note of self-congratulation about the writer's own courage-- degenerate into "mere me-me-me-singing" (Gold, 284). Herr's primary concern is to reveal the war as it happened. He "preaches no sermons, draws no morals, enters no ideological disputes" (Gray, 600).

In addition to the directly subjective element of the story, there is vivid description of the surroundings and atmosphere. He captures the look and the humid feel of the landscape. And through conversations and experiences with soldiers he is able to provide an image of them much deeper than the sound bites and quotes offered by conventional news. Without sentimentalizing them, Herr depicts the "grunts" sympathetically. Most of them are pitifully unfortunate men who have been thrown into a nightmare, yet at the same time they are crude, ignorant and have allowed themselves to become numb to the violence around them and which they commit themselves. In this dichotomy and in how the relate to their surroundings Herr catches glimpses of their reality and of their humanness. For example, this scene:

Like a hand-held camera, Herr's narrative rushes from one episode to the next, its microphone picking up the slang of the soldiers and the rock n' roll they listened to. Herr shows the war through anecdotes that hit one note or another of the live truth. He finds the literary details that make the whole thing move. For example, Herr describes an episode where he and several other men are trapped by enemy fire behind a low rice paddy wall waiting for a gunship to rescue them:

Jimi Hendrix blasting in a rice paddy under fire. Such surrealistic juxtapositions of east and west appear throughout Dispatches. "That music meant a lot to them," wrote Herr. Even Hendrix had been in the 101st Airborne. The men took comfort in the music. It was part of how they dealt with the war, escaped from it for moments at a time, and its sounds were the theme music of Vietnam, and the cursing and slang of the soldiers were its language.

Herr also succeeds in making the war an American experience. Though he does not moralize, Herr finds that the Vietnam war was not something confined to itself, but represented aspects of the American consciousness. Vietnam revealed what can happen to men in war, but there was also an element that was uniquely American. The U.S. went into Vietnam to "save" it from Communism, marching into a culture we knew little about. The rescuers became oppressors. Herr once met a soldier who told him that he thought "Americans treated the Vietnamese like animals:

It took more than Vietnam to make the Vietnam war. The causes of it were as much back home as in the jungle. "There's been nothing happening there that hadn't already existed here, coiled up and waiting, back in the World" Herr wrote (268). He discovered that all of America went into making the Vietnam quagmire (Ringnalda, 290). As he wrote for the final lines of Dispatches "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there" (224). Certainly, anyone who's read Dispatches has been there.