ABSTRACT
Magazines and periodicals have been crucial platforms for the evolution and development of American literary journalism. Celebrated examples include Richard Wright’s “I Tried to Be a Communist” (Atlantic Monthly, 1944), Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (New Yorker, 1965), Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (Saturday Evening Post, 1966), Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (Rolling Stone, 1971), and Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” (Outside, 1997). In examining the way that periodicals have launched, nourished, and promoted the careers of literary journalists, this chapter suggests that magazines exist in a near symbiotic relationship with the creative forms of narrative and discursive nonfiction they helped to spawn. Because so many best known works of literary journalism are now read in book form, it is sometimes forgotten what roles magazines have played as incubators of inventive and experimental journalistic prose, not only in the 1960s and 1970s when the Tom Wolfe-style “new” journalism first emerged but earlier within the heritage of American literature.
