UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form

Jacket Cover: "A History of American Literary Journalism" by J.C. Hartsock

John C. Hartsock

Winner of the Book of the Year Award of the American Journalism Historians Association

Winner of the Book Award of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2001

A study of the origins and development of an important literary genre

During the 1960s, such works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem were cited as examples of the "new journalism." True stories that read like novels, they combined the journalist's task of factual reporting with the art of fictional narration.

Yet as John C. Hartsock shows in this revealing study, the roots of this distinctive form of writing—whether called new journalism, literary journalism, or creative nonfiction—can be traced at least as far back as the late nineteenth century. In the decades following the American Civil War, Stephen Crane, Lafcadio Hearn, and other journalists challenged the notion, then just emerging, that the reporter's job was to offer a concise statement of the "objective truth." Drawing on the techniques of the realistic novel, these writers developed a new narrative style of reporting aimed at lessening the distance between observer and observed, subject and object.

By the 1890s, Hartsock argues, literary journalism had achieved critical recognition as a new form of writing, different not only from "objective" reporting but also from the sensationalistic "yellow press" and at times the socially engaged "muckrakers." In the twentieth century, the form has continued to evolve and maintain its vitality, despite being marginalized by the academic establishment.

A former journalist who covered Capitol Hill for UPI and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union for the San Francisco Examiner, Hartsock brings a fresh and informed perspective to the issues he examines. The result is a concise introduction to the genesis and development of a significant literary genre.

"A substantial, well-written, and well-argued book that is likely to become a standard work in literary journalism."

Norman Sims, editor of Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century

John C. Hartsock teaches communication studies at SUNY, Cortland.

Journalism / Literary Studies / American Studies
288 pp.
LC 00-030279
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-252-6
2000
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