This week’s newsletter is, after a fashion, a recap of a recap. By 1972, when New York was not quite five years old, there had been absolute oceans of admiration, criticism, hand-wringing, punditry, and pointless debate about something called the New Journalism. Definitions of both the term and the form itself were a little bit blurry, but in the most general sense, Old Journalists were said to write straight-up inverted-pyramid copy, and New Journalists used the devices of the novelist — vivid scenes, lots more dialogue, one or more narrators’ points of view, occasional composite characters — to produce something that was, they hoped, truer to life. Although a number of magazine writers, notably The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell, John Bainbridge, and Lillian Ross, had been on that road for years, the 1960s gave a new generation the confidence to run free and a lot of juicy counterculture subjects. There were critics, of course, who said that it was shallow and showy, that some New Journalists played fast and loose with the facts, that they sometimes made up quotes. (That last one was comparatively rare, though it did happen.) An extremely incomplete reading list might include Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Gay Talese, Gail Sheehy, John Sack, and Joan Didion. Beginning around 1962, a large amount of their best work, though by no means all of it, ran in Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement called New York.

The latter was where, in 1965, Wolfe published one of his breakthrough stories: an immense two-part profile of William Shawn, the brilliant, micromanaging, profoundly private editor of The New Yorker. It’s a classic move, writing about a journalist to get other journalists talking about you, and nobody had gone right at Shawn before, whether because so many people wished to work for him someday or out of simple deference. This story was anything but deferential; it was a flat-out takedown, riotous and gleeful in voice and tone. It charged the magazine and its editor with being spectacularly dull, throttled by its own principles of decorum, overedited and underpowered. Wolfe’s profile ran in two parts on two successive Sundays. Shawn was so agitated when he saw the first that he called the Trib’s owner and tried (unsuccessfully) to get the second half yanked off the presses.

By 1972, the Herald Tribune was out of business, New York had become a successful stand-alone magazine, Wolfe was a national figure, and the New Journalism was beginning to be absorbed into just plain Journalism. (William Shawn, for his part, had arguably zhuzhed up The New Yorker in the interim, publishing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and taking some increasingly vigorous anti–Vietnam War positions. Maybe he was responding to Wolfe’s criticism; maybe the times were just changing.) To mark the more or less tenth birthday of the movement, Wolfe wrote another two-part cover story, which includes the backstory of the Shawn business plus a lot of entertaining material about the newspaper culture Wolfe himself had encountered at the start of his career. He never wrote a full-length memoir, but this is arguably the closest he got, right down to an aside about custom suits with real working buttonholes on the cuffs. The sentences show some pretty impressive hand tailoring, too.