El Nuevo Periodismo

In the essays that make up the first part of the book, Tom Wolfe offers a provocative analysis of a phenomenon that emerged around the mid-1960s and shook the American literary landscape: the rise of so-called "New Journalism," which, according to Wolfe, wrested the spotlight from the sterile and dying novel and became the richest literary genre of the era. For the New Journalists, who immersed themselves where "things were happening," it was necessary to "make contact with complete strangers, somehow get into their lives, ask questions to which you have no natural right to expect an answer, pretend to see things you have no reason to see, etc." And, faced with the novelists' inability to cope with the dizzying change experienced by American society, "they had the entire 1960s of crazy, obscene, tumultuous, mau-mau, drug-soaked, lust-ridden North America all to themselves." And in this way, New Journalism took up the great realist novel of previous centuries, Wolfe recounts, although "all I meant to say at the beginning was that New Journalism can no longer be ignored in an artistic sense. I take back the rest… To hell with it… Let chaos reign… Louder music, more wine… To hell with categories…"