WJ.COM READER’S CHOICE

THE GANG THAT WOULDN’T WRITE STRAIGHT
By Marc Weingarten
(Crown: 2006)
http://www.crownpublishing.com

Three years into my journalism career, a college professor changed my world and the way I write forever. He introduced me to the New Journalists, the men and women led by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion who brought fiction techniques to journalism and mastered the art of narrative storytelling. Unfortunately for me, it was 1979 and the movement was dying in the flames of cable television, Rupert Murdoch, Rolling Stone’s exodus to New York and the salacious quest for ratings and sensationalism so prophesied in Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant movie, Network.

I didn’t care about the timing: I knew an authentic, from-the-heart means of telling a true story when I saw it on paper. I became the newest student of New Journalism, and incorporated it into my newspaper and magazine journalism. Later, I adopted the skills to the hot game in town, personal memoir, which owes its roots to the New Journalists.

Thus, I was more than pleased to see Marc Weingarten’s The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight hit the bookstands. The book offers a delicious journey into the heart and history of the New Journalism movement through the back stories and words of Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin and visionary editors such as New York magazine’s Clay Felker and Esquire magazine’s Harold Hayes, who provided the editorial wells and support for these writers to cut loose and re-define the writing of true stories.

The book also celebrates lesser known—but vitally important—New Journalists such as Vietnam War writers Michael Herr, Warren Hinckle and John Sack, economics writer Adam Smith, and forerunners John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Capote and Lillian Ross. It also touched upon the tumultuous historical events that shaped the need to tell stories in a more direct, more visceral way: Vietnam War, formation of protest groups, Haight-Ashbury, the rise of feminism and youth movements, the tumbling down of the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

Weingarten pulls an enormous variety of stories, styles and personalities into a single 325-page book with solid journalism, crafty interviewing and tight storytelling. His love for New Journalism spreads across the pages, but so does his responsibility to give everyone their due. This could easily have been the story of Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the new journalism revolution—as the cover suggests—but he expanded far beyond that.

He also made sure to expound upon the different techniques and ways in which the New Journalists molded, bent, invented and otherwise changed how stories were reported and written. This alone makes The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight a must-read for all narrative storytellers, whether memoir writers, magazine journalists, essayists or students looking for their vision and their voice.