Tom Wolfe is widely regarded as the leading theorist and practitioner of New Journalism, the journalistic genre that combines the stylistic features of fiction and the reportorial obligations of journalism to produce a "novelistic sounding" but nonetheless factual literature. The saliency of Wolfe's stylistic boldness has prompted many…

Claiming that literary newswriting is not a contradiction in terms, that is, an oxymoron, this essay examines some of the criteria against which literary newswriting can be measured, defines what constitutes literary newswriting in contemporary newspapers, and explains how it contributes to modern newswriting. The paper argues that (1) modern…

Addressing the question of the usefulness of the concept of New Journalism, this study also seeks to define the essential characteristics of New Journalism and to determine whether, in fact, there is such a thing. The first chapter reviews the critical literature of New Journalism, sorting out some of the many uses of the term, then narrowing the…