The Mechanic & the Muse: What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #1

Reporting

"Made in the Shade"
A package on Southern writers: profiles, interviews and an 11-state directory of writers you may never have heard of but are worth your time. Appeared in Creative Loafing chain.
"Mass Appeal"
A day-in-the-life profile of a telegenic parish priest in Miami. Published in Catholic Digest, reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times
"The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham"
How the first West Point graduate from South Vietnam disappears after the fall of Saigon, only to be rescued by his classmates two decades later. A cover story in The Washington Post Magazine

Dick Cheney, hunter extraordinaire, was the ostensible subject of my recent post, "Ready, Aim, Oops." But reader Harris Salat was eager to learn the source of the final paragraph when I described a tool of 19th century literary realists that Tom Wolfe and other so-called "New Journalists" relied on in their nonfiction.

I replied that it's from a long introduction by Wolfe in "The New Journalism," an anthology edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, published in 1973. There are used copies on Amazon.com

But that seemed a stingy response, and so I copied out the seven paragraphs Wolfe used to define status details and three other device the New Journalists borrowed from their literary ancestors. I'll dole them out one by one over the next four days. The source is my hardcover edition of "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 31-32. Wolfe writes:

"If you follow the progress of the New Journalism closely through the 1960s, you see an interesting thing happening. You see journalists learning the techniques of realism—particularly of the sort found in Fielding, Smollett, Balzac, Dickens and Gogol—from scratch. By trial and error, by “instinct” rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its “immediacy,” its concrete reality,” its emotional involvement,” “its gripping” or “absorbing quality."

"This extraordinary power was derived mainly from just four devices, they discovered. The basic one was scene-by-scene construction,(emphasis added) telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place…"

Next: Dialogue