The gang that couldn't write straight

About this book

Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again--from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn't provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos. Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide an account of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent--and significant--years in contemporary American life.--From publisher description.