Tim Sprinkle

About

In addition to serving as an online repository for my clips and other assorted work projects, I hope to use this blog to highlight the latest/greatest in nonfiction and long-form journalism. Everything from magazine articles, to books, to web postings will be featured and discussed here, hopefully making up somewhat for the fact that modern nonfiction seems to be all but ignored by the bookish press (even though the rumor is that seven out of every eight books sold is nonfiction).

From Tom Wolfe's intro to The New Journalism (1973 and I'm sure long out of print):

"I doubt that many of the aces I will be extolling in this story went into journalism with the faintest notion of creating a "new" journalism, a "higher" journalism, or even a mildly improved variety. I know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world... causing a panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century... Nevertheless, that is what happened. Bellow, Barth, Updike--even the best of the lot, Philip Roth--the novelists are all out there right now ransacking the literary histories and sweating it out, wondering where they stand. Damn it all, Saul, the Huns have arrived...

God knows I didn't have anything new in mind, much less anything literary, when I took my first newspaper job. I had a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea... Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn... Nights down at the saloon listening to "Back of the Yards'" being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke--it was always nighttime in my daydreams of the newspaper life. Reporters didn't work during the day, I wanted the whole movie, nothing left out..."