Yet for a few years in the 1960s, Esquire unexpectedly emerged as
perhaps the best general-interest magazine in the country, if not the
world. Some remarkable editors (Clay Felker, Harold Hayes) assembled an
equally remarkable group of columnists and reporters, and gave them their
heads. Norman Mailer was dispatched to the 1960 Democratic Convention.
Garry Wills followed the civil rights revolution around the country.
Michael Herr reported from the boonies in Vietnam. Articles got longer
and more personal, and adapted the techniques of fiction to the needs of
journalism. This was a broader, deeper literary movement than one might
gather from accounts of "the new journalism" by Tom Wolfe, whose early
Esquire pieces on pop culture made him famous. Decades later, and despite
all the subsequent excesses of first-person journalism, the positive
legacy of the Esquire of the 1960s is still with us. Today's Esquire still
includes superior investigative journalism in its mix -- but not questions
about the political and sexual status quo.
-- Steve Badrich
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