Tom Wolfe: I became involved in what eventually was known as “The New Journalism” as soon as I got to New York. I still had in my mind I was going to write a novel. But this New Journalism — which was writing nonfiction using devices of the novel and still being accurate in the journalistic sense — was so exciting; you know, people like Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, who were doing it, and many others —that I just wasn’t interested particularly in the novel, until after I’d done The Right Stuff, which was nonfiction, and I had written it like a novel. It was the first time in my life I ever had a little cushion of money. And I decided this was a good time— if I ever was to sit down and write a novel, this was the time to do it because I could afford it. Because always, in the back of your mind, those people are saying, “Boy, this nonfiction stuff is the most elaborate writer’s block I’ve ever heard of.” You don’t tackle the big one because you’ve discovered this new thing that’s supposedly better.