In The New Journalism (1975), Tom Wolfe signalled a recent and significant shift from fiction to direct reportage. According to Wolfe, the novel was losing ground to the new journalism mainly because it had wilfully abandoned the terrain demanded by the public, vivid realism. The new journalism was practised as extensively by proven novelists and essayists as by professional reporters, for example Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, and Mary McCarthy. Irving Howe's essay, 'Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction' (1959) was published a year before Harry Levin used the same concept of the postmodern to designate an 'anti-intellectual undercurrent' threatening the humanism and enlightenment characteristic of modernism. A major difficulty besetting postmodernist criticism was the definition of 'literature'. As Cornis-Pope tells it, 'postmodern theories and practices played a catalytic role' in the 'breakup of the Cold War structure' right through to the Glasnost' era.