Congratulations to all of us! It was, after all, recently our golden anniversary. Sort of.
Fifty years ago, on Valentine’s Day of 1972, New York magazine published “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” a proclamation that, it is clear from this vantage point, provided a standard and direction and a way of unifying nonfiction writers—essayists, journalists, memoirists—into one cohesive, albeit loosely determined, category that we now call creative nonfiction.
To be fair, this is sort of an arbitrary anniversary to celebrate. Much of what Wolfe was saying in 1972 he had said before, as had a few others. But this article was a wake-up call, what I believe was the beginning of the changing of the guard. A symbolic moment when all of the different flavors of nonfiction were transformed into a literary art.
Wolfe had two primary objectives in writing his proclamation. First, he meant to dethrone the novel as the pinnacle of literary success and achievement. Second,
