I’ve never been a big fan of defining “literary” journalism—or coming up with a specific set of aesthetic criteria for studying it. To be sure, what I often call this “is it or isn’t it” question was once seen as important to for achieving broader academic acceptance. But inevitably such criteria can also be narrowing as well. And so, for instance, resistance has sometimes been expressed for including in the literary-journalism canon that seemed too much like “memoir” (isn’t Dispatches partly a memoir?), or travel literature (there goes much of Joan Didion), or anything smacking of the “sociological” (hence the exclusion of not a small slice of Susan Sheehan’s work, among several other writers’).

In short, I prefer a big tent approach to genre. A more inclusive strategy would be to devote ourselves to identifying and studying the many different “types” or genres—or, hybrids of—narrative journalism. For example, a while back–while I was working on an essay about Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story (2017) —I started reading books of narrative journalism that, like Goldstein’s, had been awarded the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, currently overseen by the Columbia Journalism School.  (I’d read Lukas’ Common Ground [1985] years prior, and I wondered what the Prize reflected preferences, stated or otherwise, for Lukas’ style.) And so, after finishing Janeseville, I read other Lukas Prize winners: Susan Southard‘s Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War (2015), Eliza Griswold‘s Amity and Prosperity (2018), and Jessica Goudeau’s After the Last Border (2020).   

Naturally, there are interesting differences between these four texts. But they also have traits in common:

• Rather than being conventionally (or popularly-thought of as) “novelistic,” there were aspects that made them nearly “epic” in form. They were often sprawling and ambitious in scope, contained (like generational or family novels, or proletarian fiction of the 1930s) multiple protagonists, and moved across a swath of time outside the journalist’s presence or immersion;
• Rather than focusing on a single individual or family, they are often reoriented towards a larger sample or collectivity (an urban profile, victims or citizens at large, or again a group of families). Goudreau, for example, juxtaposes experiences between a refugee from Myanmar and one from Syria—both female, married, and with children (one has them with her, the other does not);
• Their portraiture was often aimed at a particularly “hot” political issue (corporate abandonment, fracking, asylum restrictions, the long-term effects of nuclear Bombs) and thus (as the prize puts it) they explore a key “fracture” within the US national psyche now or in the past. But like a “chronicle” they took those fractures into a quotidian portrait of everyday life–in Goldstein’s case, for instance, how “job loss” affects the trip to a supermarket; and
• They were often deeply engaged with or aiming at a “long” history—in some cases, a long story that brings us back up to the present. (One thinks of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, of course.) To use John Steinbeck’s term–in a manner akin to Cristina Rathbone’s A World Apart, Goudeau intersperses intercalary chapters of historical changes in US border and asylum policy (Lukas, of course, had himself turned to writing an historical version of this “type,” Big Trouble [1997]).

My sampling here is anything but scientific—the Prize looks at many different kinds of work—and the commonalities I see here are merely “roughed out,” intuitive and provisional. But as I’ve suggested here–

These books are already, themselves, big tents.

So, what other genres are out there? What genre would you think needs closer study?