by Cody Ryder

Created on: June 20, 2009

New Journalism, Gonzo, and Thompson

America's culture was undergoing great change n the 1960s and 1970s. The Beatles, The Doors, and The Grateful Dead ruled the airwaves. Hippies ruled the streets of San Francisco and other major cities. Drug use and abuse was on the rise. And amid all of this, a few American writers came to prominence writing in the style known as New Journalism. These journalists introduced the public to a new way of viewing events. They were unconventional at best and incoherent at worst. One of these great writers, Hunter S. Thompson, rose above the rest to create an even more creative style. This style, dubbed Gonzo, was a central part of the New Journalism movement and its influence can still be seen today.

Tom Wolfe had been an active writer for years and realized that the articles that some of his contemporaries were turning out were distinct from anything that had come before them. Many people had described them as unconventional or weird but Wolfe wanted a proper name for what he considered a new style. So he put together a collection of essays from over a dozen writers that wrote in the style he called New Journalism. But it wasn't just anything that he considered New Journalism. A work had to contain four things to classify it as New Journalism.

First, a writer had to witness the events himself. Wolfe felt that in order to recreate a scene for the reader, the journalist had to see what happened himself. Second, and this goes hand-in-hand with the first tenet, the writer needed to include as much dialogue as possible. This would help capture the event for the reader and place them in the action. Journalists also wrote about people as if they were people in a novel. This allowed the journalist to write about the thoughts (or what they believed to be the thoughts) of the person. The final point of New Journalism comes from the fictional style realism. The writer must describe the surroundings of the main event to further immerse the reader in the story. Though New Journalism uses many features usually found in fictional works, it is important to realize that New Journalism is in no way fiction. It could be called "creative nonfiction" (a term more commonly used today) but, unlike fiction, it is wholly rooted in fact.

Many well-known authors took part in the New Journalism movement. These people ranged from writers primarily noted for their fiction (Truman Capote, George Goodman) to everyday journalists that covered

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