The Boys on the Bus
Encyclopedia
Timothy Crouse
-Family:Timothy Crouse's affinity for campaign reporters and the theater took root thanks to his father, Russel Crouse, who was a career newspaperman and playwright. "The stories he told me of his newspaper days—especially traveling around the country with prankish sports teams—had a fatal tinge of...
's seminal non-fiction book detailing life on the road for reporters covering the 1972 United States presidential campaign.
The book was one of the first treatises on pack journalism
Pack journalism
Pack journalism is an often derogatory term used to describe the tendency of news reporting to become homogeneous. The term was coined by Timothy Crouse....
ever to be published, following in the footsteps of Gay Talese
Gay Talese
Gay Talese is an American author. He wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and helped to define literary journalism...
's 1969 "fly on the wall" look into the New York Times called The Kingdom and the Power
The Kingdom and the Power
The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World was a 1969 book by Gay Talese about the inner workings of The New York Times, the newspaper where Talese had worked for 12 years...
.
The Boys on the Bus evolved out of several articles Crouse had written for Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
. When released, the book became a best-seller and is still in print today, often being used as a standard text in many university journalism courses.
Several very recognizable reporters, whose bylines could be seen into the 21st century, are at turns critiqued, lampooned and glorified within the book, including R.W. "Johnny" Apple, Robert Novak
Robert Novak
Robert David Sanders "Bob" Novak was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving for the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for...
, Walter Mears
Walter Mears
Walter Mears is a Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist with the Associated Press. Mears was also one of the Boys on the Bus that covered the 1972 presidential election between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his coverage of the 1976 presidential...
, Haynes Johnson
Haynes Johnson
Haynes Bonner Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author, and TV analyst. He has reported on most of the major news stories of the last half-century and is widely regarded as one of the nation's top political commentators.He began his newspaper career in 1956 as a reporter...
, David Broder, Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
and Jules Witcover
Jules Witcover
Jules Joseph Witcover is an American journalist, author, and columnist.Witcover is a veteran newspaperman of 50 years' standing, having written for The Baltimore Sun, the now-defunct Washington Star, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post...
, not to mention the politicians they were covering: Richard M. Nixon and George McGovern
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern is an historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee in the 1972 presidential election....
. Later editions of the book contain a foreword by Thompson.