The gang that couldn't write straight
Subtitle: Wolfe, Mailer, Didion, and the New Journalism revolution
By: Marc Weingarten.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 325
Subjects: Mailer, Norman -- Criticism and interpretation.; Didion, Joan -- Criticism and interpretation.; Wolfe, Tom -- Criticism and interpretation.; American prose literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Reportage literature, American -- History and criticism.; Journalism -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Description: Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again--from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn't provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos. Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide an account of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent--and significant--years in contemporary American life.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.