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The fifth chapter examines the roles of interviewer and interviewee, exploring debates around objectivity and personality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a period in which these roles came under pressure, partly as a reaction against the interrogative interviewing that dominated in previous decades. Drawing on the famed series of interviews in The Paris Review and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and colleagues, the chapter illustrates how the interview emerged as a site where authors could discuss those topics such as methodology, market orientation, and intention that had been largely dismissed by New Criticism. These writers and publications, while beholden to a canonical modernist tradition, reject this older conception of the interview. In so doing, they enabled the interview to be conceived by authors, including ageing modernists, as an aesthetically and critically engaged activity in an age of celebrity authorship.

This introduction presents a brief biography of Joe Sacco and survey of his work as a comics artist. It also evaluates Sacco’s contribution to alternative comics, the New Journalism, comics journalism, and war literature. It concludes with a summary of the essays contained in the book.

To better recruit and discipline their young distribution force, newspaper publishers and circulation managers in the 1880s became pioneers of corporate welfare. Led by Joseph Pulitzer in St. Louis, E. W. Scripps in Detroit and Cincinnati, Victor Lawson in Chicago, and George Booth in Grand Rapids, Michigan, they organized newsboy banquets, excursions, clubs, schools, and marching bands. They also sponsored newsboy boxing tournaments and fielded newsboy baseball teams. A dozen eastern newspapers formed their own newsboy baseball league. Newsboys took full advantage of these programs, as well as the newsboy homes and reading rooms founded by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, but they also organized unions, struck for better pay and working conditions, and participated in political campaigns and protests. Ultimately, they sought justice over charity.

Joan Didion's life long battle with self-pity and self-delusion ground to a halt in the memoirs of her husband's and later her daughter's deaths. The chapter traces Didion's relationship to feeling and morality, which both are enacted in style. From the earliest work at the National Review in the early 1960s to her memoir Blue Nights in 2011, Didion examined the ways feeling blinded and, paradoxically, anesthetized a pain of greater, but unacknowledged, depth. Her style of moral hardness, advocated in reviews of fiction and feminism, and developed in the story of the Donner Party, which appears throughout her work, eventually collapses in a reassessment of sentiment and self-reflection.

This essay reviews the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), by James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explores the daily lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Agee affects those who read him. For Jimmy Carter, the impact of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men seemed to be moral and religious. For Tad Mosel, Agee's presence was supernatural. Mosel's 1961 Pulitzer-winning play, All the Way Home, was adapted from Agee's posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family. Agee literally informs And Their Children After Them (1989), the book in which Dale Maharidge and the photographer Michael Williamson documented the lives of the survivors and descendants of the three families with whom Agee lived in Alabama. Agee was also a strong influence on the New Journalism of the 1960s.

This essay reviews the book The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, by Norman Mailer. First published in 1968, The Armies of the Night is a journalistic mock epic of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. The book presents Mailer as a reluctant participant in a mass protest against the Vietnam War that took place in October 1967. During that time, the so-called New Journalism was in full bloom. The Armies of the Night stood out in some important ways. In particular, Mailer got as close as he could to the gears of power, and then used his own sensibilities as a set of coordinates by which to measure the dimensions of people and events on the national stage: presidents and astronauts, championship fights and political conventions. Mailer's most significant discovery in Armies was the technique of writing about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in a novel.

In this essay, Gerry Beegan examines women’s columns in the illustrated papers produced by the Ingram Brothers in the 1880s and 1890s: The Illustrated London News (1842–1900), the Sketch (1893–1959), and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (1874–1943). Images of women were ubiquitous in these weeklies, but it was in the women’s columns that feminist politics were most often addressed. The Illustrated London News, for example, sometimes addressed women’s employment and other topics affecting women–controversial subject matter that was safely embedded in an otherwise tame mixture of advice on fashion and cookery. The Lady’s Pictorial, founded by the Ingram Brothers in 1880, took a similar approach by mixing conventional feminine subject matter with debates on gender issues. However, while its sister papers were more likely to feature actresses and celebrities in their women’s columns, the Lady’s Pictorial depicted women ‘out in the world … enjoying the London social season, attending charitable events, participating in sports, and engaging in amateur drama’ (p. 248). Utilising both text and illustration, it defined a new brand of ‘modern mobile womanhood’ (p. 253).

This essay reviews the book Wallace, by Marshall Frady. First published in 1968, Wallace is a biography of Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama. The book received wide acclaim, during a period when the “New Journalism” was expanding the boundaries of literary nonfiction. Frady approached Wallace as a nonfiction version of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men—“a tale of the methodical, relentless, and inexorable progression of a political Snopes, with a dauntless, limitless, and almost innocent rapacity, to the threshold of our most important political office.” A young liberal with a vigorous commitment to racial equality, Frady undoubtedly loathed Wallace's politics; but there is nothing shrill or polemical in his rendering of the Alabama governor. Instead, Frady, in novelistic fashion, brought his subject to life with uncanny flair, and with considerable affection and sympathy.

With the success of Hercules, Levine was often the subject of articles and profiles in the popular press. In addition to being profiled in publications such as Time, Life, and Esquire, he was lampooned as “Joe LeVenal” in the satirical Mad magazine. This chapter concentrates on Levine’s emergence as a public figure of note and the self-promotional tactics he used to achieve what was an unprecedented amount of fame for a film importer and promoter. The chapter also shows how Levine capitalized on the criticism he was subjected to in order to position himself in opposition to America’s cultural elites and how he was able to take advantage of being a divisive figure to keep his name in the press.