Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere — Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr — to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the ‘60s and ‘70s and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, and the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience — they were the New Journalists.