How Tom Wolfe’s style changed news magazines

Nonfiction writing used to be dry and boring. Until his 1973 essay, The New Journalism, changed everything

boring. His point is that one had to find ways to take any subject and make it come to vivid life — something non-fiction writers have taken to heart ever since. Wolfe’s second big point was that, because non-fiction writers couldn’t make things up the way a novelist could, they had to do more work to be able to write with the same authority.

In The New Journalism, Wolfe put himself at the centre of “his” movement in a way that was probably overstated; writers like Talese and Michael Herr and many others were just as important. A new deeper kind of non-fiction writing would likely have emerged even without Wolfe.

But he was its joyous propagandist, and his willingness to explain what he was doing, and how he was doing it, caused the next generation of magazine writers, my generation, to yearn to do what he was doing.

Today, there is an entirely new generation of non-fiction writers, people like Rachel Aviv at the New Yorker and Taffy Brodesser-akner of the New York Times. And they don’t call it New Journalism anymore, or even literary journalism. Now it’s long form. I doubt many of these younger writers have ever read the essay that helped shaped me and my generation of magazine writers. But they don’t have to. The things Wolfe once so consciously taught are now taken for granted, instinctively understood by every ambitious non-fiction writer.

That’s what Tom Wolfe did for journalists. And for readers.