Introduction: Nonfiction With a Literary Purpose. - Conclusion: A Queer Genre. - Appendix: Literary Nonfiction at the Decade's End. - Index.

The author places the New Journalism in historical context and gives it definition of form. His focus is upon what he calls literary nonfiction, the form of writing that continues the tradition of realism by directly recording or reporting on the world rather than recreating it as fiction.

Weber looks in useful detail works in the 1940's by James Agee and John Hersey, and brings study up through Truman Capote and Norman Mailer to Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joseph Wambaugh, Tom Wicker, Jo Duren-Smith, C.D.B. Bryan, Thomas Thompson, and others.