When the so-called New Journalism burst upon the scene in the 1960s, some critics were quick to note that the form was not really new; it had precursors, if not a tradition. Lillian Ross's Picture (1952), a dramatic account of the making of the film The Red Badge of Courage (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1951), was cited as a classic work of "new journalism" that preceded the 1960s version by about fifteen to twenty years, having first been published in The New Yorker in 1952. In one of the early studies of the genre, The New Journalism in America: Other Voices (1974), Everette E. Dennis and William L. Rivers placed Ross among a handful of writers who were "chiefly responsible for developing the new nonfiction." Since then it has been demonstrated that the New Journalism of the 1960s was part of a tradition of literary journalism predating Ross in the United States by almost one...