Lillian Ross: Invisible Observer
In May 1950, Lillian Ross, a 23-year-old New Yorker staff writer, became the talk of the town when the magazine published her sharply observed profile of Ernest Hemingway. Both praise and controversy followed. Written in an intimate, literary style, it was a warts-and-all portrait of a man who was, at the time, one of the […]
Erik Larson on Escaping the “Dark Country of No Ideas”
The most difficult part of my writing life begins the moment one of my books is launched. I am not talking here about the angst that arises while waiting for the first reviews to get published, though that is indeed a time of significant anxiety. No, the hard thing for me is beginning the search […]
Between the Lines: Longform’s Podcast
I’m a lover of podcasts, and my favorite is Longform. Hosted by Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky (co-founders of Longform Media) and Evan Ratliff (CEO of media and software company Atavist), it features hour-long interviews with longform writers (and occasionally editors or designers) and is a compelling behind-the-scenes look into the nuts and bolts of journalism. […]
The Typewriter Revolution
Like every technology throughout history, the typewriter had its revolutionary moment when it was a paradigm-shifting device, communicating ideas faster and more efficiently than anything previously imagined. Although there were many mechanical writing devices before it, the revolution really began with the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer (Christopher L. Sholes also invented the QWERTY keyboard, […]
The Worthy Elephant: On Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
For the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, a discussion of craft, veracity and the literary appeal of true crime. BY DAVID HAYES, SARAH WEINMAN HAZLITT BOOKS: JANUARY 27, 2016 The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some […]
The Cold, Hard Facts About In Cold Blood
The occasion: This month marks the 50th anniversary of Truman Capote’s classic book, In Cold Blood, the story of the brutal murder of a farmer and his family in rural Kansas. What he said: Capote called it a “nonfiction novel” and told George Plimpton in a 1966 Paris Review interview: “One doesn’t spend almost six years […]
A Soft Landing at the Intersection of Creative and Nonfiction
Q: In July 1942, eight Lockheed P-38 Lightnings and two Boeing B-17 Bombers made a crash landing on the Greenland ice cap. Five decades later, while writing a book on a salvage operation of one of the planes, I wanted to reconstruct what happened in 1942 so readers would feel as though they were present, […]
The Typewriter: A Graphic History
Janine Vangool’s lovely coffee-table book, The Typewriter: A Graphic History of the Beloved Machine is finally available. Vangool, who loves typewriters even more than I do, runs UPPERCASE, a design studio in Calgary, Alberta which, among other things, publishes UPPERCASE magazine. The new book pictorially documents the typewriter from the late 19th century to the 1980s (when […]
Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Reporting & the “New Journalism”
The birth of what Tom Wolfe called “The New Journalism,” according to the manifesto he wrote in 1972 as an introduction to an anthology with that title, can be dated to Gay Talese’s profile of retired boxer Joe Louis published in Esquire in the fall of 1962. Wolfe isolated this passage as an example: “Hi, sweetheart!” […]
A Modern Classic: Olympia Report Electronic
In 1983, faced with writing my first book, I decided to replace my manual Underwood typewriter with an IBM Selectric, the iconic classic electric model of the era. Then I discovered a new electronic model, the Olympia Report Electronic. It had a relatively feather touch, although it was far from feather-weight (imagine eight or ten laptops) and, […]