Abstract
On his way to cover a story overseas, a young reporter learns that his ship is in trouble. In the midst of this once-in-a-lifetime—possibly endofa-lifetime—story, he observes the scenes around him: a young oiler bailing water in the ship’s fire room, the oiler and others (with help from the reporter himself) struggling to lower a lifeboat, the chief engineer jumping onto a raft, the first mate diving into the sea, and at last the ship going down. A full day later, after a harrowing journey in a ten-foot dinghy with three other men, he finds himself back on terra firma, the rich details of the story still fresh in his brain.
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Notes
Stephen Crane, “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” in Prose and Poetry (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 875–84; Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” in Prose and Poetry, 885–909.
For discussions of the nature of journalism, the development of news criteria, and the evolution of the structure of news articles, see Mark Canada, Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and Their Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 20–22; Norma Green, “Concepts of News,” in American Journalism, ed. W. David Sloan and Lisa Mullikin Purcell (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 34–43; Tim P. Vos, “New Writing Structure and Style,” in American Journalism, 296–305.
A writer for the Los Angeles Express observed, “Stephen Crane, the novelist, badly disguised as a newspaper war correspondent at Athens, has published a letter chiefly made up of abuse of a western newspaper man who succeeded in getting an interview with King George. … Mr. Crane’s dispatches, by the way, are pretty specimens of fair English, but as far as their information-values go, have the disadvantage of being one or two days behind the news dispatches sent from the seat of war.” For other attacks on Crane, see Mark Canada, Literature and Journalism, 54–56.
Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 55, 114–15; Christine Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1966), 175–76, 178, 213, 235. For examples of the coexistence of literature and news in early newspapers, see the July 24, 1732, issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette; the September 12, 1732, issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette; the April 4, 1797, issue of The Farmer’s Weekly Museum; and the June 19, 1797, issue of The Farmer’s Weekly Museum. The last of these publications, for instance, contains, among other items, “Proceedings of the Federal Congress,” an account of the Battle of Casasola, death notices, and poems.
Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 12; Mott, American Journalism, 47, 50–51, 103, 155.
Mott, American Journalism, 48, 52, 55; Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 3, 6, 32–33. For examples of the contents of colonial newspapers, see the March 16, 1732, issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which features an edict by the Portuguese king, news from Amsterdam and other European cities, brief items about a local fire and a suicide, shipping news, and several advertisements.
Wm. David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams, The Early American Press, 1690–1783 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 59–60; Norman S. Grabo, “The Journalist as Man of Letters,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 34.
Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 51; Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 34.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic, 1978), 77; Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 82.
“Police Office,” New York Herald, August 31, 1835; James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 33; Mott, American Journalism, 156; Greeley is quoted in Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press, 156; Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 144; Mott, American Journalism, 233–35; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press, 45; “Harrington’s Great Lunar Panorama,” New York Sun, September 28, 1835, 2; “Herschel’s Great Discoveries,” New York Sun, September 1, 1835, 2; William Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 20; Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 50; Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005), 7. For examples of the Herald’s contents, see the October 24, 1835, and April 12, 1836, issues of the Herald, which feature, among other things, coverage of the grisly murder of Helen Jewett, news of a fatal steamboat accident, stories of a stabbing and the death of a prodigal heir, and a brief item with this taunt of a rival paper: “THE SUN is alarmed (and very justly too) at the rapid progress of the Herald in popularity, patronage, and circulation. It begins to call in the aid of its low, vulgar editors and police reporters.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 100.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Slave Narratives (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2000), 362; Frederick Douglass, “Our Paper and Its Prospects,” Dec. 3, 1847, The Papers of Frederick Douglass, Container 21, Reel 13, Library of Congress; Canada, Literature and Journalism, 52; Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts”; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R. Reichardt (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009), 259; Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron-Mills,” in ARebecca Harding Davis Reader, ed. Jean Pfaelzer (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 25–26; Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 126; James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, in Representative Selections, ed. Robert E. Spiller (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1936), 215; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 723–74; Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 94.
Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, 51; Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 194, 197–98; Mott, American Journalism, 332, 546; Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 139.
Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper, 1940), 255–56; Twain is quoted in Edgar M. Branch, “Introduction,” in Early Tales and Sketches (Berkley: University of California Press, 1979), I: 50; Howells is quoted in A. J. Kaul, “William Dean Howells,” in American Magazine Journalists, 1850–1900, ed. Sam G. Riley (Detroit: Gale, 1989), 202; Bryant is quoted in James Boylan, “William Cullen Bryant,” in American Newspaper Journalists, 1690–1872, ed. Perry J. Ashley (Detroit: Gale, 1985), 84.
Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 4.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 5–6, 59–60, 66; Edgar M. Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (New York: Russell & Russell, 1950), 151; Joseph J. Kwiat, “The Newspaper Experience: Crane, Norris, and Dreiser,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8 (September 1953): 99; William White, “Hemingway Needs No Introduction...,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades (New York: Touchstone, 1967), xii; “The Star Copy Sheet,” Kansas City Star, http://www.kansascity.com/static/pdfs/Hemingway _style_sheet.pdf; Hemingway is quoted in Matthew Bruccoli, ed., “Back to His First Field,” in Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 21.
Truman Capote, interview on “The Public Eye,” May 24, 1966, CBC; Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” in The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 20.
Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” 3–9, 31; John Hollowell, Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 38, 23. See also George Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel,” New York Times, January 16, 1966, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-interview.html.
Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel”; Capote, interview on “The Public Eye”; Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” 9, 15, 31–33; Hollowell, Fact and Fiction, 26–31. Both Wolfe and Hollowell enumerate specific features of the new journalism.
Geoffrey Baym, From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010), 106–7, 110, 112.
Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750, 2, 6; John Hollowell, Fact and Fiction; Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, 6–7; Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature; Charles Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Roggenkamp, Narrating the News; Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel; Baym, From Cronkite to Colbert, 20; Canada, Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America; Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” 1–52; David S. Reynolds, “Public Poison: Sensationalism and Sexuality,” in Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 167–333; Thomas B. Connery, “A Third Way to Tell the Story: American Literary Journalism at the Turn of the Century,” in Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Norman Sims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3–18; Thomas L. Leonard, “News at Walden Pond” in News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93–100; Nancy Warner Barrineau, “Introduction” to Theodore Dreiser’s Ev’ry Month (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996), xv-xl; Mark Canada, “The Critique of Journalism in Sister Carrie,” American Literary Realism 42.3 (Spring 2010): 227–42.
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Canada, M. (2013). Introduction: A Brief History of Literature and Journalism in the United States. In: Canada, M. (eds) Literature and Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329301_1
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