A Girl Like You: The Other New Journalists

In his introduction to the first New Journalism collection, published in 1973, Tom Wolfe lists a handful of reporters from the 1930s and '40s as "Not Half-Bad Candidates" for the title of progenitors of the form, including John Hersey A. J. Liebling, and George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway's reportage from Europe. Subsequent anthologies and textbooks on twentieth-century literary journalism mostly agree—including, from the stacks I'd been browsing, The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight, a family-tree sort of account of "the new journalism revolution; the herculean anthology The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism; and True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism, which essentially unpacks the historical context for this writing.

I found these books while looking for a few women writers who, for the most part, aren't included in them—roving journalists and foreign correspondents whose magazine bylines ran alongside the Not Half-Bad Candidates. In the prodigious output of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Emily Hahn, Virginia Cowles, and Dorothy Thompson—women whose work chronicled everything from the rise of the German Nazi party to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s—one senses an exuberant rebuke to the tedious story of women on the edges of literature and journalism alike, to the "girl reporters" in Vietnam whose scoops often went unacknowledged, to the dispiriting pie charts in annual VIDA counts, to Nieman Foundation reports on waning numbers of women atop mastheads. In their day, these women enjoyed large followings in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, the New Republic, and other mainstream publications. And yet, among the stack of books I found on twentieth-century literary journalism, I noticed only a brief mention of West and Gellhorn, with no trace of the others.

These women had written as New Journalists, more or less: as a persona, subjective and interesting, shaping reported information often acquired via full immersion. They had filed stories from around the globe during and between the First and Second World Wars; most kept at it for careers that lasted into the 1960s and '70s, as Wolfe was crediting himself with the "discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device." Reading that introduction today, the authority he claims feels quaintly grandiose. Wolfe, as various pieces written after his death this year have noted, was a capable self-promoter. Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Truman Capote—they were all doing the same thing at more or less the same time, and their writing is included in that first collection. And yet the predecessors Wolfe named are those that are still recycled in anthologies and histories, on syllabi and in criticism. Wolfe's assertion of the history of the genre has gone largely unchallenged in these nearly fifty intervening years.

West and Gellhorn have been somewhat popular recently, appearing as central and ancillary characters in books of history, literary travelogue, and criticism, as well as in an HBO movie and a forthcoming teen graphic novel. Whatever the format, they are nearly always assessed in proximity to either their lovers or other women writers. In Gellhorn's case, she serves as the second ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway to narrate a novel about him by bestselling author Paula McLain. West, meanwhile, is a central figure in Michelle Dean's group biography Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. As for their female contemporaries (never mind their journalistic heirs who practiced after the 1940s), their absence from these collections provokes a different question: When do anthologies and textbooks publish the writing of women journalists at all?

Looking closer at their contents, a pattern emerges. A woman's writing, in the form of long...