New journalism: fiction and non-fiction literature

Sometimes the limits between the fiction and the journalist style are really closer. In the 60’s in United States grown a new tendency called “New Journalism”: is a new way of stylistic process to enrich the frame stories: with realistic dialogs, detailed description and a metalanguage.

As in traditional investigative reporting, writers in the genre immersed themselves in their subjects, at times spending months in the field gathering facts through research, interviews, and observation. Their finished works were very different, however, from the feature stories typically published in newspapers and magazines of the time.[1]

The concept is consolidated today, and the mix between genres is already gaining importance although The New Journalists’ ideas continue to be explored and refined by new generations of reporters and editors. Here there is a list of the most important books:

Operación Masacre ("Operation Massacre") is a nonfiction novel of investigative journalism, written by noted Argentine journalist and author Rodolfo Walsh. It is considered by some to be the first of its genre. The novel details the José León Suárez massacre, which involved the 1956 capture and shooting of Peronist militants, including rebel leader Juan José Valle.[2]

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction book first published in 1966, written by American author Truman Capote; it details the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children. The book examines the complex psychological relationship between two parolees who together commit a mass murder. Capote's book also explores the lives of the victims and the effect of the crime on the community in which they lived. In Cold Blood is regarded by critics as a pioneering work of the true crime genre, though Capote was disappointed that the book failed to win the Pulitzer Prize.

As he explained in Music for Chameleons Preface “Many people thought I was crazy to spend six years wandering around the plains in Kansas; others rejected my whole concept of the “non-fiction novel”[3]

Relato de un naufrago, Gabriel García Márquez. The full title is The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time. The story is written in the first-person from the perspective of the sailor, 20 year-old Luis Alejandro Velasco, and was in fact signed by Velasco as author when it was first published in 1955. Not until 1970 when it was published as a book was García Márquez's name first publicly associated with the story.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada  (Chronicle of a Death Foretold ) is a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1981. It tells, in the form of a pseudo-journalistic reconstruction, the story of the murder of Santiago Nasar by the two Vicario brothers. 

Heban, (The Shadow of the sun), is a novel of Ryszard Kapuściński, published in 1998. The novel is split in 29 short stories, telling the adventures of the author while he was working as a journalist in Africa between 1957 and 1990. The story has no beginning, is a new way of telling stories.

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe,1987. Is considerate the novel of New York City. A broker have to solve his life after one night in Bronx District when he is traveling with his lover. The novel is a critics to the manners of the high society of New York.

           

Sources:

[1]Encyclopedia Britannica

[2]Wikipedia

[3]Music for Chameleons.  Truman Capote. ISBN:0-394-50826-2