The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe
Published 1973 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage
How hard is The New Journalism to read?
The New Journalism scores 32 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Energetic journalistic vocabulary with Wolfe's characteristic stylistic exuberance.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 63 out of 100
- Craft theory is embedded in historical narrative and polemical argument.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- The introduction packs a comprehensive theory of the form into a dense argument.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Wolfe's argument is direct, though made through historical storytelling.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Relatively low; the exemplary pieces carry more figurative weight than the framing essays.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Wolfe's rhetoric is deliberately provocative and self-consciously performative.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Wolfe makes his thesis explicit and resolves his argument confidently.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Long introductory essay plus anthology sections organized by technique and subject.
How The New Journalism is regarded
The New Journalism holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.