When I began teaching a course on American literary journalism, I was puzzled by the 30-year gap between the end of what was considered the New Journalism and the contemporary writers who were my focus. Was everything written since Tom Wolfe's influential 1973 introduction to The New Journalism -- in which he argued that nonfiction, not the novel, had become "the most important literature being written in America today" -- merely a footnote to that movement?

The more I looked into it, the more I came to understand that not only was Wolfe's account inaccurate, but it was also an impediment to appreciating both the distinctively American quality of modern literary journalism and its continuity with its 19th-century predecessors. And since the way writers construct the story of who we are is as important for our culture as it is for the study of journalism, Wolfe's distortions pose a genuine dilemma.

For even as Wolfe was celebrating the triumph of the New Journalism, the seeds of an even more formidable stage in American literary evolution were being planted. In the years since Wolfe's manifesto, a group of writers has been quietly securing a place at the very center of contemporary American literature for reportorially based, narrative-driven, long-form nonfiction. These New New Journalists -- Ted Conover, William Finnegan, Jonathan Harr, Alex Kotlowitz, Jon Krakauer, William Lang-ewiesche, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, Richard Preston, Eric Schlosser, Lawrence Weschler, Lawrence Wright, and others -- use the license to experiment with form earned by the New Journalists of the 1960s and 70s to speak to social and political concerns similar to those of 19th-century writers like Stephen Crane, Jacob A. Riis, and Lincoln Steffens (an earlier generation of New Journalists), synthesizing the best of the two traditions. Hence the admittedly clumsy moniker, the New New Journalists...