Abstract

Beat the Devil

Journalist Herb Caen wrote maybe 15 million words across his lifetime and now that he's gone, dead in San Francisco, California at the age of 80, the author of this article explains why he was, for the author, the best journalist in the United States. Back in the spring of 1976 the author pitched journalist Clay Felker on the idea that gossip was back. Felker at that time was running two periodicals: New York and The Village Voice, and when people wanted quotes on something called the New Journalism they sought him out. According to the author, Caen gave San Francisco a sense of itself, a sense that might be bitchy, sentimental, facetious, irritated, discursive, knowing, indignant or outraged, depending on his mood, which might often be the city's mood on that particular day. Because he had unerring taste, excellent manners and a matchless sense of his audience, Caen most certainly didn't try to make his column as nasty as possible.