Reporter at large

...Liebling's voice was one of the few in the establishment press to decry publishers' hysteria during the McCarthy era...

...He advanced a story scene by scene, with attention to the points of view of the characters involved, realistic dialogue, and carefully selected detail...

...Liebling's story, which ultimately was quite a sad one, is told for the first time in Raymond Sokolov's book, Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J...

...Abbott Joseph Liebling, who died at fifty-nine in 1963, was regarded by many as the finest reporter of his day...

...Sokolov's portrait of Liebling's "intricate, shy, troubled" personality is sketchy in places, probably because the biographer had no chance to interview his subject...

...The poster depicted a bald man peering sardonically through thick glasses, his triple chin striving to envelop the knot of his tie...

...Beneath the photograph was a quotation: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one...

...He failed to achieve such acclaim and died from chronic overeating and excessive drinking...

...Nevertheless, Wayward Reporter is a highly readable tribute to a journalist whose talent deserves greater recognition...

...In the 1960s Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and others achieved recognition for their work in a sort of no-man's land between fiction and nonfiction...

...Liebling exposed stories which national newspapers had neglected, such as Mississippi's plan to establish a state secret police...

...Liebling...

...As an incisive critic of his own profession and as the satiric conscience of American journalism, Liebling pioneered the sort of press criticism practiced later, and usually less well, in such publications as More and Washington Journalism Review...

...Liebling, was familiar to these trivia buffs...

...Liebling pioneered decades earlier by applying to news stories the techniques of literary realism...

...One reporter's desire for diversion was not fulfilled by the quiz...

...If Sokolov's biography accomplishes nothing else, it may stir new interest in Liebling and earn him wider credit for his contributions to American letters...

...Not long ago in the Treasury Department press room, a group of reporters chose to kill what they could of an afternoon by taking The Washington Star's daily Trivia Quiz, which some regard as the best feature of that paper...

...Pointing to a yellowed poster dangling from a bulletin board in a smoky corner of the room, he demanded, "Who is that...

...A Francophile, Liebling was deeply impressed during World War II by the French Resistance newspapers and became convinced that a national press can be dynamic and present conflicting views in excellent prose, as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre demonstrated...

...A recurring theme throughout Sokolov's biography is Liebling's spirited battle against the conventions of journalism, a fight he initiated as a cub reporter in Rhode Island in the mid-1920s and continued through his last "Wayward Press" column in The New Yorker thirty-five years later...

...No reporter could identify this cynic...

...In that column, which Liebling began in 1945, he repeatedly satirized the herd instinct among journalists and the narrow like-mindedness of newspaper publishers and editors...

...He was an innovator practicing what came to be called "The New Journalism" before some of its supposed inventors—Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson—had even learned to read...

...The quality of Liebling's work in extremely eclectic fields, ranging from the Normandy invasion in World War II to Paris restaurants and the "art" of gluttony, from the "sweet science" of boxing to the con-artists of Times Square, rivals that of more famous writers for whom he led the way...

...Sokolov describes how "The Wayward Press," the forerunner of modern press criticism, came to be an influential force, widely read by the working press...

...As Liebling lapsed into obscurity shortly after his death, Mailer and Capote employed his techniques in their "nonfiction novels" such as The Armies of the Night and In Cold Blood...

...As a sharp observer with an acute ear for dialogue, and as a prose stylist, Liebling was almost without peer among journalists...

...It might also lead to republication of the anthologies of Liebling's articles in The New Yorker, which are long out of print...

...He reported only what he saw and heard and eschewed the pundit's "big picture...

...Sokolov recounts Liebling's personal life and his struggle for recognition as an "artist" of nonfiction...

...Not even the cynic's name, A.J...

...Christopher Hanson (Christopher Hanson is a reporter based in Washington who covers the economy and Capitol Hill for several newspapers in North America and abroad...

...As a product of the 1960s, Tom Wolfe celebrated the so-called "New Journalism" and regarded himself as one who "dethroned the novel as the number one literary genre...

...Yet a reporter unfamiliar with Liebling misses about as much as an American fiction writer who has not read Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...Liebling gave readers, in a way conventional reportage never could, a sense of what it was like to be a Norwegian sailor eluding U-boats in the North Atlantic, or a soldier aboard a landing craft on D-Day, or a Floyd Patterson training to take on Sonny Liston...