This wide-ranging collection of critical essays on literary journalism addresses the shifting border between fiction and non-fiction, literature and journalism. Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century addresses general and historical issues, explores questions of authorial intent and the status of the territory between literature and journalism, and offers a case study of Mary McCarthy’s 1953 piece, "Artists in Uniform," a classic of literary journalism. Sims offers a thought-provoking study of the nature of perception and the truth, as well as issues facing journalism today.

Journalism in the twentieth century was marked by the rise of literary journalism. Sims traces more than a century of its history, examining the cultural connections, competing journalistic schools of thought, and innovative writers that have given literary journalism its power. Seminal exmples of the genre provide ample context and background for the study of this style of journalism.

Some of the best and most original prose in America today is being written by literary journalists. Memoirs and personal essays, profiles, science and nature reportage, travel writing -- literary journalists are working in all of these forms with artful styles and fresh approaches. In Literary Journalism, editors Norman Sims and Mark Kramer have collected the finest examples of literary journalism from both the masters of the genre who have been working for decades and the new voices freshly arrived on the national scene. The fifteen essays gathered here include: -- John McPhee's account of the battle between army engineers and the lower Mississippi River -- Susan Orlean's brilliant portrait of the private, imaginative world of a ten-year-old boy -- Tracy Kidder's moving description of life in a nursing home -- Ted Conover's wild journey in an African truck convoy while investigating the spread of AIDS -- Richard Preston's bright piece about two shy Russian mathematicians who live in Manhattan and search for order in a random universe -- Joseph Mitchell's classic essay on the rivermen of Edgewater, New Jersey -- And nine more fascinating pieces of the nation's best new writing In the last decade this unique form of writing has grown exuberantly -- and now, in Literary Journalism, we celebrate fifteen of our most dazzling writers as they work with great vitality and astonishing variety.

Aiming to provide a history of and contextualize a literary form he calls literary journalism, Hartsock (communication studies, SUNY Cortland) provides evidence of the emergence of a "modern" American literary journalism; discusses reasons for the form's emergence and epistemological consequences; describes antecedents to the form; analyzes how to distinguish it from other nonfiction forms; offers post-fin de siecle evidence of the form up to the 1960s; and offers reasons for its critical marginalization. Intended for graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and journalists. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Essays that place literary journalism in an international context

Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalismexplores the central role of narrative journalism in the formation of national identities in Latin America, and the concomitant role the genre had in the consolidation of the idea of Latin America as a supra-national entity. This work discusses the impact that the form had in the creation of an original Latin American literature during six historical moments. Beginning in the 1840s and ending in the 1970s, Calvi connects the evolution of literary journalism with the consolidation of Latin America’s literary sphere, the professional practice of journalism, the development of the modern mass media, and the establishment of nation-states in the region.

The first study of the role of the newspaperwoman in American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, this book recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells and fictional characters like Henrietta Stackpole, the lady-correspondent in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. It chronicles the exploits of a neglected group of American women writers and uncovers an alternative reporter-novelist tradition that runs counter to the more familiar story of gritty realism generated in male-dominated newsrooms. Taking up actual newspaper accounts written by women, fictional portrayals of female journalists, and the work of reporters-turned-novelists such as Willa Cather and Djuna Barnes, Jean Marie Lutes finds in women's journalism a rich and complex source for modern American fiction. Female journalists, cast as both standard-bearers and scapegoats of an emergent mass culture, created fictions of themselves that far outlasted the fleeting news value of the stories they covered. Front-Page Girls revives the spectacular stories of now-forgotten newspaperwomen who were not afraid of becoming the news themselves—the defiant few who wrote for the city desks of mainstream newspapers and resisted the growing demand to fill women's columns with fashion news and household hints. It also examines, for the first time, how women's journalism shaped the path from news to novels for women writers.