It is part of the mythology of journalism that every journalist secretly wishes to be a novelist, and has an unpublished typescript or two in his or her desk drawer. There is some truth in this notion, which arises from the fact that so many journalists perceive their profession to be in some sense less worthy than that of the true man or woman of letters, the genuine artist. Journalists often harbour inferiority complexes, and even those who have succeeded in rising to the upper ranks of the profession may see themselves as under-achievers who have missed their true calling in life. In the hierarchy of cultural distinction, journalism lies below literature in the minds of many of those who practise either or both.

The rise of New Journalism in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe persuasively argued, was a product not least of the ambition of some journalists to be regarded by their peers and their publics as more than hacks, and to acquire the status of literary figures in a cultural marketplace where literature was annointed as Art and journalism was so often regarded as Trash. Hunter S. Thompson is described in one recent profile as ‘a writer who wanted to be a novelist but wound up revitalising journalism while simultaneously despising it’. His Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perhaps the best example of the ambivalence created by the status gap which exists between journalism and creative writing, the lingering sense even amongst the greatest of journalists that what they are doing is less worthwhile as cultural practice than the work of the novelist or poet.