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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.
Norman Mailer: The Sixties Boxed Set
Norman Mailer: The Sixties Boxed Set
$80.00
Here, in a deluxe two-volume Library of America boxed set, are two novels, two book-length masterpieces of new journalism, and thirty-three essays.
Four Books of the 1960s presents An American Dream, Mailer’s hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence; Why Are We in Vietnam?, in which a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war; and the acclaimed “non-fiction novel” The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago, on-the-scene/in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968. In these revolutionary books Mailer cast himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade’s political upheavals.
In Collected Essays of the 1960s acclaimed Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon gathers for the first time all the essential essays from the classic collections The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), and Existential Errands (1972), each a fascinating window on one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous decades in the nation’s history. A self-appointed exorcist of the culture’s demons and an unrestrained mythologizer of his own identity, Mailer contemplated and often skewered icons of politics and literature, charted psychosexual undercurrents and covert power plays, and gloried in the exercise of a pugnacious prose style that was all his own. Whether writing about Jackie Kennedy or Sonny Liston, the realist tradition in America or the internal culture wars of the Republican Party, the death of Ernest Hemingway or the battle against censorship, Mailer was always ready to intervene in what he called “the years of the plague.”
Each Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.