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HUNTER S. THOMPSON & NEW JOURNALISM
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005), Kentucky-born, Air Force veteran, dedicated to journalism early on, was a storyteller who incorporated anthropological approaches to his journalistic fieldwork. He perceived the truth that a story about others depended on the self at the desk writing the story. How much, how honestly, and how overtly that self is recognized in the story is critical, Thompson felt, and he wasn’t shy about saying so. He is the founder of New Journalism, what he called “gonzo journalism,” which is an ongoing experiment in narrative in which the writer is a central character and thereby a participant in what is related or described.
Thompson’s influence is staggering to this day. Not only the obvious comrades in the field — Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer, Joe McGinniss, George Plimpton, Rex Reed, Mike Royko, Terry Southern, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Dan Wakefield, and Tom Wolfe — but fiction writers, too, paid attention to the possibilites of what Thompson articulated.
Thompson is an essential American moral voice in its literature, a description that would probably make him laugh, but consider the evaluation an Air Force officer wrote in giving Thompson his honorable discharge: "In summary, this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members.” Classic description of the role of the writer in American literature.
In developing this page, associated New Journalism writers will be added, both those contemporary to Thompson and those who operate in his legacy.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968
$18.00
In this landmark work of journalism, Norman Mailer reports on the presidential conventions of 1968, the turbulent year from which today’s bitterly divided country arose. The Vietnam War was raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. In August, the Republican Party met in Miami and picked Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats backed Lyndon Johnson’s ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupted. Antiwar protesters filled the streets and the police ran amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television—and captured in these pages by one of America’s fiercest intellects.
Praise for Miami and the Siege of Chicago
“For historians who wish for the presence of a world-class literary witness at crucial moments in history, Mailer in Miami and Chicago was heaven-sent.”—Michael Beschloss, The Washington Post
“Extraordinary . . . Mailer [predicted that] ‘we will be fighting for forty years.’ He got that right, among many other things.”—Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic
“Often reads like a good, old-fashioned novel in which suspense, character, plot revelations, and pungently describable action abound.”—The New York Review of Books
“[A] masterful account . . . To understand 1968, you must read Mailer.”—Chicago Tribune