Adventures in the Scribblers Trade
The Most Fun You Can Have
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
THIS BOOK is neither memoir nor autobiography. It’s an adventure in I-am-a-camera story-telling: about people and events that passed in front of one observer’s lens. It comes in two parcels. First: the pop culture part---personalities, showbiz, movies, theater, authors. And second: the public sphere of war, oppression, politicos, and the world beyond our borders---and, indeed, beyond our solar system.
A prominent editor once told me: “Journalism is the most fun you can have, standing up.” Journalists, mostly, never get rich. Unlike the prostitutes we are regularly compared to, we do it for love. The public holds us in low esteem. Leonard Woolf wrote to Lytton Strachey: “Having failed as, (a) a civil servant, (b) a novelist, (c) an editor, (d) a publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung…journalism.” Oscar Wilde, too, was dyspeptic on the matter: “As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.”
There’s a visceral pleasure that comes with digging out facts, getting the story straight, and writing it on deadline. And, yes, the tingle of seeing your name at the top of a column of print or on the cover of a magazine never gets old. Also, it makes your mother happy. I knew correspondents in Vietnam who felt more alive there than at any other time in their lives, and, although they were sleeping on the ground in the rain forest and eating potted military rations, they didn’t want to go home. They’d never call it “fun,” but they wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It’s what they’d remember most proudly for the rest of their lives.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Neil Hickey was a twenty-four year old job seeker when he heard the editor of a major magazine call journalism “the most fun you can have, standing up.”
The young reporter had already come to that conclusion independently after working his way through college as a Baltimore newspaperman. He’d go on to spend more than a half century meeting movie stars, musicians, and some of the most powerful people in Washington as he honed his craft.
Now an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Hickey shares an insider’s view of pop culture, war, oppression, and even happenings beyond our solar system.
Meeting astronaut Neil Armstrong trumped interviews with presidents of the United States, secretaries of state past and present, and Nobel Prize winners. In Singapore, his assignment was to serve as a judge for the Miss Universe contest.
Whether it’s chatting with President Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, traveling with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger or investigating the Challenger spacecraft disaster, Hickey shares deep insights into American culture, the nature of war, and the art of journalism in Adventures in the Scribblers Trade.
About the Author
Neil Hickey is a veteran writer and editor on newspapers and magazines. He began his journalistic career in Baltimore and resumed it in New York after three years as a naval officer aboard a destroyer during and after the Korean war. Reporting assignments have taken him to Vietnam, the 1991 war in Kuwait, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany during the Soviet period), Cuba, the Baltics, Northern Ireland, Singapore, and around the U.S. He served as the New York bureau chief of the original TV Guide, at that time the country’s best-selling magazine. He is former editor-at-large of the Columbia Journalism Review and now serves as adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York City and Putnam County, N.Y