The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Read Online Free PDF

who had done some reporting in France for
The New Yorker
just prior to Pearl Harbor for the magazine’s Letter from Paris section (he was on a Norwegian tanker headed back to New York on December 7, 1941), returned to Europe in 1942, this time to devote his energies to reporting on the war. His pieces from the front lines, such as “The Foamy Fields,” his classic March 1943 story about the African campaign in Tunisia, are similar in spirit to Orwell’s ground-level reportage. Liebling plunks himself squarely in the middle of his stories and then applies his sardonic yet clinical eye to the particulars of entrenched warfare life:
    The five-gallon can, known as a flimsy, is one of the two most protean articles in the Army. You can build houses of it, use it as furniture, or, with slight structural alterations, make a stove or locker out of it. Its only rival for versatility is the metal shell of the Army helmet, which can be used as an entrenching tool, a shaving bowl, a wash basin, or a cooking utensil, at the discretion of the owner.
    One writer who straddled the disparate cultures of both
Time
and
The New Yorker
, and thus moved seamlessly from weekly deadline dispatches to in-depth reportage, was John Hersey, the whiz-kid Yale grad who covered more terrain during the war—in both the geographic and psychologicalsenses—than perhaps any other journalist of his generation. The son of missionaries based in China, Hersey had a blinkered childhood, unaware of the larger cultural currents unfolding beyond the walls of his father’s mission in Tientsin. When his parents moved to New York in 1924, Hersey attended the Briarcliff Manor public schools, then Yale, where he was a star football player and a contributor to the college newspaper.
    Hersey was intent on becoming a journalist from an early age; as an adolescent, he self-published his own newsletter, the
Hersey News
, and was determined to get a job at Henry Luce’s
Time
, which was the endgame for many aspiring reporters during the 1930s. For Hersey,
Time
was “the liveliest enterprise of its type” and he wanted, “more than anything, to be connected with it.” After serving for a short time as novelist Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, Hersey was hired as a
Time
copyboy, but he quickly nabbed a plum assignment when Japan invaded China in 1937. Shorthanded, and cognizant of Hersey’s Chinese upbringing,
Time
pressed Hersey into service. He was only twenty-five years old.
    From there, Hersey journeyed throughout Japan, China, and Europe for
Time, Life
, and
The New Yorker;
he witnessed German atrocities in Poland and the Baltic states, and reported on the conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists in Shanghai, Ichang, and Peiping. In 1943, Hersey wrote an important antecedent to the impressionistic school of reporting. “Joe Is Home Now” was a piece that drew from forty-three interviews Hersey conducted with returning soldiers.
    “Joe Is Home Now” is a key precursor to the wartime New Journalism of John Sack and Michael Herr. Hersey makes no pretense about the story being factual. “I guess I’d been thinking from the beginning, and had been experimenting a little bit with the pieces I did for
Life
, the notion that journalism could be enlivened by using the devices of fiction,” Hersey told
The Paris Review
in 1986. “My principal reading all along had been fiction, even though I was working for
Time
on fact pieces.”
    Two years before the war’s end, at the apex of the country’s veneration of “our boys” as stolid heroes, here was Hersey listening to stories of emotional dispossession and psychic fragmentation, of discharged soldiers struggling to readjust to civilian life. Two decades before the Vietnam War, Hersey’s interview subjects were articulating a kind ofpost-traumatic stress disorder. Hersey combined his best anecdotes into a single composite character called Joe Souczak, and then stitched a single narrative out of his