ABSTRACT
This chapter provides Mark Kramer’s personal account of finding his narrative “voice” as a writer “coming of age” in the 1960s. Kramer details his various realizations and discoveries about the “minimal human voice,” which is “unlike the voice of daily journalism or academic papers, or business memos, or partisan essays [and] in particular not the voice of someone official.” Encompassing both his personal trajectory as a writer and the current state of literary journalism in the US, Kramer argues that this narrative journalism voice has become an essential feature of contemporary journalism, a voice especially well-suited for representing the social contexts and constructs of US culture.
