This article originally appeared in the December 1972 issue of Esquire.
I have no idea who coined the term “the New Journalism” or even when it was coined. Seymour Krim tells me that he first heard it used in 1965 when he was editor of Nugget and Pete Hamill called him and said he wanted to write an article called “The New Journalism” about people like Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese. It was late in 1966 when you first started hearing people talk about “the New Journalism” in conversation, as best I can remember. I don’t know for sure…. To tell the truth, I’ve never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with “New” in it is just begging for trouble. The garbage barge of history is already full of them: the New Humanism, the New Poetry, the New Criticism, the New Conservativism, the New Frontier, il Stilo Novo … The World Tomorrow…. Nevertheless, the New Journalism was the term that caught on eventually. At the time, the mid-Sixties, one was aware only that all of a sudden there was some sort of artistic excitement in journalism, and that was a new thing in itself.
I didn’t know what history, if any, lay behind it. I wasn’t interested in the long view just then. All I knew was what certain writers were doing at Esquire, Thomas B. Morgan, Brock Brower, Terry Southern and, above all, Gay Talese … even a couple of novelists were in on it, Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, writing nonfiction for Esquire … and, of course, the writers for my own Sunday supplement, New York, chiefly Breslin, but also Robert Christgau, Doon Arbus, Gail Sheehy, Tom Gallagher, Robert Benton and David Newman. I was turning out articles as fast as I could write and checking out all these people to see what new spins they had come up with. I was completely wrapped up in this new excitement that was in the air. It was a regular little league we had going.
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