Journalism as Literature: Ink-Stained Wretches
Discover the best books where journalism meets literature, from Tom Wolfe's *The Bonfire of the Vanities* to Hunter S. Thompson's *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*. Explore curated works by Ernie Pyle, George Orwell, and Studs Terkel in this essential reading list on ink-stained wretches, narrative nonfiction, and literary reportage.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
50th Anniversary Edition • With an introduction by Caity Weaver, acclaimed New York Times journalist This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. Also a major motion picture directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.
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Ernie Pyle's War
by James Tobin
When a machine-gun bullet ended the life of war correspondent Ernie Pyle in the final days of World War II, Americans mourned him in the same breath as they mourned Franklin Roosevelt. To millions, the loss of this American folk hero seemed nearly as great as the loss of the wartime president. If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call “The Good War.” Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column—all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell. It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent—a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. These he brought to bear on the Battle of Britain and all the great American campaigns of the war—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and finally Okinawa, where he felt compelled to go because of his enormous public stature despite premonitions of death. In this immensely engrossing biography, affectionate yet critical, journalist and historian James Tobin does an Ernie Pyle job on Ernie Pyle, evoking perfectly the life and labors of this strange, frail, bald little man whose love/hate relationship to war mirrors our own. Based on dozens of interviews and copious research in little-known archives, Ernie Pyle's War is a self-effacing tour de force. To read it is to know Ernie Pyle, and most of all, to know his war.
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Good-Bye to All That
by Robert Graves
English author Robert Graves says goodbye to England, family, friends, and a way of life.
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The Armies of the Night
by Norman Mailer
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award With a Introduction by Adam Gopnik Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer’s seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America’s two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak. The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. “[Mailer’s] genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature.”—Time “Only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive.”—Alfred Kazin, The New York Times Book Review
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Hard Times
by Studs Terkel
Receates the character and atmosphere of this dramatic era in a collage of recollections by both well-known and abscure Americans.
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Following the Equator
by Mark Twain
Illustrated journal of his trip across America, to the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa
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A Mencken Chrestomathy
by H.L. Mencken
Edited and annotated by H.L.M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books—the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong—but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all. Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.
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Barbarians at the Gate
by Bryan Burrough
"Barbarians at the Gate" is the classic account of the defining takeover in Wall Street merger history. The authors' gripping record of the frenzy that overtook Wall Street, in fall of 1988, gives a richly textured social history of wealth at the twilight of the Reagan era.
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The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe details his wild cross-country ride with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, offering a vivid portrayal of the hippy subculture in its own joyful, psychedelic, excessive, and terrifying colors.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
One of the most celebrated bestsellers of the decade, here is Wolfe's wise and wickedly brilliant novel of lust, greed, Wall Street and the American way of life in the '80s.
