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Print journalists have big complicated feelings about Tom Wolfe, the American literary legend who died Monday aged 88. He is one of the giants of our trade, and this use of the word “giants” includes the sense “difficult, dangerous obstruction.” In the 1960s Wolfe, sent by magazines to chronicle American culture from low (stock-car racers, surfers) to high (New York society, Marshall McLuhan), pioneered a colourful, swashbuckling “New Journalism,” and coined that phrase. Then, lest his ownership of the concept be challenged, he personally edited a definitive anthology of New Journalism that is still served hot to J-school undergrads. If you have ambitions as a reporter writing in English, there is no getting around Tom Wolfe as either practitioner or theorist. He made sure to cover both avenues.

And after all that he did the unexpected: he sold out to the novel. He had become a major figure in American letters entirely on the basis of magazine features, while throughout the ’70s (and beyond) he conducted a running fight with the old, sex-obsessed crocodiles of American fiction. The great realistic novels of the 19th century, in Wolfe’s view, had all been based on meticulous, toilsome social observation that was almost indistinguishable with what the 20th century calls reporting. It was journalism-like practice that gave Trollope or Zola or Hugo their energy, their zap.

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So… why bother with novelistic form at all? All the tricks of storytelling and language are available to the journalist: the right to invent scenes outright is a mere triviality. Long-form fiction has no hope of competing with long-form non-fiction, Wolfe assured us then. The novel was doomed, a choking, bleeding creature.