Artists

Abstract

This chapter states that journalistic artists are often celebrated cultural figures, even celebrities. Ten Days That Shook the World can be read as one of the pioneering works of self-consciously produced ‘literary journalism’. It is an acknowledgement of the inevitable partiality of the journalistic observer, and a plea for the value of the reportage which such partiality permits. Reds takes us beyond John Reed's book, to the point where partiality becomes mere propaganda and, in Warren Beatty's account of Reed's final months, something to be resisted. In Cold Blood is a ‘true crime’ story. Both Capote and Infamous take as their subject the potential unreliability of the journalistic narrator, and the validity of using literary techniques to convey a more intense truth than conventional reportage alone could achieve. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas stands as a late twentieth-century recognition of the power of Hunter Thompson's journalism.