Richard Ben Cramer's death has brought a chorus of praise from fellow scribes for the writer whose career marked the end of the extravagant nonfiction writing known as New Journalism. I liked Cramer's early pieces in Esquire and other magazines, but thought his work turned self-indulgent and increasingly unreadable.
His big, messy monstrosity of a campaign book, "What It Takes," showed the limits of the behind the scenes political reporting pioneered by Teddy White. The line of decline ran from White to Hunter S. Thompson to Cramer. His next generation celebrants uniformly cite "What It Takes" as a transformative masterpiece, the book that inspired them to want to be political journalists. I'm sure they're sincere but wonder if general readers found Cramer's bloated book so magical.
Cramer's biography of Joe DiMaggio was more controlled, yet still seemed to focus more on the author and his strained writing than on the subject. The book seemed smaller than DiMaggio's large life.
An adherent of the self-advertising preening macho literary persona of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, Cramer was an ambitious, free-swinging writer. To me, he overreached and crashed. His admirers see him as taking flight.
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