{"product_id":"the-gang-that-wouldnt-write-straight-wolfe-thompson-didion-capote-and-the-new-journalism-revolution","title":"The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution","description":". . . In Cold Blood  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  Slouching Towards Bethlehem  The Armies of the Night . . .  Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period  a group of writers including Tom Wolfe  Jimmy Breslin  Gay Talese  Hunter S. Thompson  Joan Didion  John Sack  and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders  including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer  to remake American letters. The perfect chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change  they were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back againfrom war to rock  assassination to drugs  hippies to Yippies  Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldnt provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos.  Marc Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era  set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulentand significantyears in contemporary American life. These are the stories behind those stories  from Tom Wolfes white-suited adventures in the counterculture to Hunter S. Thompsons drug-addled invention of gonzo to Michael Herrs redefinition of war reporting in the hell of Vietnam. Weingarten also tells the deeper backstory  recounting the rich and surprising history of the editors and the magazines who made the movement possible  notably the three greatest editors of the eraHarold Hayes at Esquire  Clay Felker at New York  and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. And finally Weingarten takes us through the demise of the New Journalists  a tragedy of hubris  miscalculation  and corporate menacing.  This is the story of perhaps the last great good time in American journalism  a time when writers didnt just cover stories but immersed themselves in them  and when journalism didnt just report America but reshaped it.  Within a seven-year period  a group of writers emerged  seemingly out of nowhereTom Wolfe  Jimmy Breslin  Gay Talese  Hunter S. Thompson  Joan Didion  John Sack  Michael Herrto impose some order on all of this American mayhem  each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands  like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer  chipped in  as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldnt  stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric  the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers  our town criers  even our moral consciencethe New Journalists. from the Introduction  From the Hardcover edition.","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44923686420533,"sku":"ByrdShop_1400049830","price":92.15,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/ByrdShop_1400049830_9b978d9d-d4fa-46cb-b3f8-3125c4f8f7a8.jpg?v=1769001621","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-gang-that-wouldnt-write-straight-wolfe-thompson-didion-capote-and-the-new-journalism-revolution","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}