The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.”
But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter.
“For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.
Tracy Tuten on 23 Mar 10This article describes a new book, Reality Hunger, which is essentially a mashup of quotes from other sources. The article discusses how are culture of short-form writing and reading is changing literature and reading. The book reminds me of elements of a Humument, which also took the work of another and then augmented that work into a new story and art form.
