literary journalism
literary journalism, a wide-ranging category that can include journalism, memoirs and other autobiographical writing, essays, history, biography, and scholarly articles. It is part of the larger genre of literary nonfiction.
Literary journalism, sometimes called creative nonfiction, literary reportage, the literature of fact, and the nonfiction novel, is fact-based, in-depth reporting that uses literary techniques of writing. Examples of these storytelling techniques, which are commonly used in both literary fiction and literary nonfiction, include description, scene-setting, dialogue, dramatization, and characterization (to name a few).
And like other literary works, such as the novel, literary journalism usually expresses a larger or literary truth about some universal aspect of human experience. Thus, Stephen Craneâs The Open Boat (1897), a work of literary journalism (not a short story) about a shipwreck and his subsequent escape, underscores how human beings are at the mercy of natural forces. When Dorothy Day wrote a piece of literary journalism in 1945 about the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States, she went far beyond the simple factual reporting of an event. Whereas most journalists emphasized the surrender of the Japanese and some celebrated the potential peacetime benefits of the new atomic technology, Dayâs interpretation was quite different. She masterfully evoked the horror of this large-scale attack on civilians, the first time that such weaponry had ever been used, and even predicted the disturbing prospect of an arms race. This is a theme to which, as a thoroughgoingly pacifist writer, she often returned. Such an interpretive slant is the province of literary journalism.
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Literary journalists often produce book-length works (e.g., Joan Didionâs Slouching Towards Bethlehem) but also commonly write shorter pieces (such as Gay Talese âFrank Sinatra Has a Coldâ). Literary journalism transcends the limitations imposed by the requirements of conventional journalism to offer a nuanced, interpretive view of factual reality, what some have called the âfeelâ of the facts. Rather than hewing to the strictly objective or at least neutral viewpoint dictated by conventional journalismâs professional norms, literary journalismâs viewpoint is unapologetically subjective. It is based on extensive research that is generally far beyond the scope of conventional journalism. Conventional reporters may interview a few personal sources and peruse several documents in order to produce a standard daily news story. But the immersion or saturation research practiced by literary journalists may require, for example, months and even years of interviewing multiple sources and investigating archival documents. Thus, unlike a conventional journalism storyâs daily and even minute-by-minute deadlines, a work of literary journalism may be weeks, months, or even years in the making.
Voice in literary journalism is distinctive and not at all necessarily that of the third-person, the traditional voice of conventional journalism. Literary journalism often uses the I (or the we) and occasionally, the you. A powerful example of the former is Meridel Le Sueurâs 1935 piece âSequel to Love,â which presents the direct, first-person voice of a narrator, a young, unwed, mentally disabled girl in an institution who has been forcibly sterilized after having a baby. An effective example of the second-person voice is seen in James Ageeâs Fortune article âCockfighting,â which directly addresses his Depression-era audience of wealthy businessmen as you. This helps underscore Ageeâs interpretation of illegal cockfighting as a practice that unites both the gentlemanly class (his Fortune readers) and the underclass in a kind of ancient, individualistic blood ritual.
The structure of literary journalism is also distinctively different from that of conventional news journalism. While the latter uses the inverted pyramid structure, presenting every fact in order of decreasing importance, literary journalism arranges structure to serve its writerâs (or writersâ) artistic purpose. That could mean, for example, flashbacks, parallel crosscutting narratives, and other manipulations of time. The summary lead is not required.
Finally, factual verifiability is a defining characteristic of literary journalism. Literary journalists aim to be recorders of reality, not its inventors. So they eschew composite characters. They do not present dialogue unless their sources have actually uttered it. Writers such as The New Yorkerâs Lillian Ross and John Hersey were sticklers for factual accuracy, which they argued is simply mandatory for all journalists.
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History
Literary journalismâs Anglo-American history is substantial and dates at least to the English writer Daniel Defoe. His A Journal of the Plague Year, first published in 1722, is an account, painstakingly and artfully reported, of the devastation the plague wreaked on London in 1665. Although Defoe was only 5 years old in 1665, his account is exceptionally vivid and affecting because of his extensive research, which included interviewing eyewitnesses. In this late 17th- and early 18th-century period, the great early British essayistsâwho include Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, and James Boswell also figure importantly in the history of literary journalism. They spurred the development of the periodical essay, an important literary and journalistic form of the 18th century. Many colonial American newspaper editors, such as James Franklin and Benjamin Franklin, were deeply influenced by the essays Addison and Steele published in their periodicals, the Tatler and the Spectator.
In the United States, which has a rich tradition of literary journalism, three time periods stand out in which the production of such writing was unusually vigorous. As the scholar Thomas B. Connery has noted, these are (1) the late 19th century, (2) the era of the Great Depression, during the 1930s, and (c) the period of the 1960s and â70s. (These are approximate time boundaries.) Each was characterized by societal upheaval, which seems to have fostered journalistsâ forays into literary journalism, which they may have seen as a more in-depth, interpretive way to report on an increasingly complex world.
Literary journalism in the 19th century was practiced by Margaret Fuller, William Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens, among others. The late 19th centuryâs literary journalists include Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Abraham Cahan, Lafcadio Hearn, Jacob Riis, Theodore Dreiser, George Ade, Julian Ralph, and Richard Harding Davis. Between the two World Wars, the Great Depression inspired literary journalism by writers such as Dorothy Day, Meridel Le Sueur, and James Agee. Important practitioners of literary journalism who emerged in the early 20th century include John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, George Orwell, Lillian Ross, John Steinbeck, and Rebecca West.
In the so-called New Journalism period of the 1960s and 1970s (and beyond), literary journalists such as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe became prominent. Some of them referred to their writing as âNew Journalism,â arguing that it was so unconventional as to be quite distinct from conventional news reporting, in which the reporter strives to remain invisible and maintain an objective voice. Wolfe was the chief popularizer of this nomenclature, using it as the title of a 1973 anthology of literary journalism, The New Journalism, that he edited. It included works by Capote, Didion, Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Wolfe. But contemporary scholars disavow the adjective new, pointing to literary journalismâs long pre-20th-century history.
In the later 20th century and into the 21st, widely read literary journalists include Sara Davidson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Herr, Tracy Kidder, Jane Kramer, Rosemary Mahoney, John McPhee, Richard Rhodes, and Ron Rosenbaum, among many others.
It should be noted that another such period of ascendancy in literary journalismâs development may possibly be found in the United States prior to the Civil War, approximately 1815â60. Then, strong reform and radical movements to abolish slavery and to advocate for world peace, temperance, and womenâs suffrage flourished. They generated many social-movement periodicals that published passionate reporting about these causes, sometimes in the style of literary journalism.
Primary publication outlets for literary journalism include magazines, especially The New Yorker, which since its founding in 1925, more than any other publication has supported and published the work of many literary journalists, including Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Truman Capote, and John Hersey. Indeed, Herseyâs book Hiroshima, an account of the atomic bombing of that city and its aftermath, was first published in its entirety in a single issue of The New Yorker in 1946. And Capoteâs In Cold Blood was first serialized in The New Yorker in 1965. Esquire, Rolling Stone, Harperâs, Texas Monthly, Saturday Evening Post, and The Atlantic are among other magazines that have regularly published the work of literary journalists. In the late 19th century and into the early 20th, newspapers also served as a common outlet for literary journalism.
Frequently, though, literary journalists develop their subjects into full-length books. This enables them to provide the depth and interpretation that is impossible to achieve in the typical brief daily news stories of conventional journalism. In the early 20th-century newsroom, it was common for writerly news reporters such as Ernest Hemingway to aspire to write the great American novel. By the late 20th century, literary journalismâreally, literary nonfictionâhad eclipsed traditional literary fiction forms such as the novel in importance and popularity. Thus, in the early 21st century, reporters were much more likely to aim their literary sights on a book-length work of literary journalism.
An international genre
In the early 21st century, literary journalism is being produced around the globe. A key example is the work of Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist writing in Russian and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her literary journalism about the turmoil of Soviet and post-Soviet life. Significantly, this was the first time that the award was given to a literary journalist. Alexievichâs work is widely available in English translation, including her books Warâs Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). Her books display her distinctive method of collecting oral histories and then presenting them as a kind of documentary testament. The vigor of global literary journalism is also shown by the work of Ryszard KapuĆciĆski of Poland, Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez of Colombia, and Helen Garner of Australia, among many, many others.
Methodological issues
Perhaps not surprisingly, two issues that may challenge practitioners of literary journalism both stem from their hallmark intensive research.
First, spending months and even years researching a story brings a reporter very close to his or her sources. Susan Sheehan, in producing her 1976 book, A Welfare Mother, grew so close to her sources, a New York City welfare mother and her family, that she accompanied them on a visit to their native Puerto Rico. Sheehan even brought along her daughter, who had grown to know this family as well. Some might argue that such familiarity is detrimental to the kind of dispassionate viewpoint that they see as journalisms true goal. But literary journalists assert that such saturation research yields a nuanced, informed perspective that transcends the limitations of quick-study, daily-deadline conventional journalism. Only by spending that amount of time with her sources and remaining close to them over a very long period could Sheehan gain the insights that she reports in her book. Literary journalists typically value a practice of responsibility, which permits them to deeply interpret their subjects provided they have completed exhaustive research as a basis for those interpretations.
Second, interior monologue is a technique that was popularized by various writers of so-called New Journalism in the 1960s and â70s. This is the practice of getting inside a characterâs headâthat is, stating what the character was thinking at this or that time. Although common in fiction forms such as the novel, interior monologue has sparked controversy when used in works of literary journalism. For example, Truman Capote was roundly criticized for his use of it in In Cold Blood (1965), his account of the murder of a farm family in Kansas and its consequences. Critics asked how he could accurately state what various sources were thinking at different times, without any qualifiers. He was also criticized for taking the diary of a murdered girl and then using that information to intuit her thoughts, which he presented as factual quotations. Today, however, this controversy has died down, and many regard the use of interior monologue by literary journalists as an acceptable convention, not to be taken literally but perhaps understood more as intended to communicate the emotional overlay of factual reality.
In sum, literary journalism is a vibrant form of writing that continues to engage writers and readers around the globe. One measure of its ascendancy is the continued growth of the scholarly organization the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies. Founded in 2006, through its annual conferences and its academic journal, Literary Journalism Studies, it promotes study of the theory, history, and teaching of literary journalism worldwide. It has brought attention particularly to non-Anglo-American literary journalism, publishing numerous articles about international literary journalism written in languages other than English.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.