In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a clutch of journalists worked a revolution. In quick succession, New Journalism classics like “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” announced a new style of writing that seemed to have limitless potential. Yet by the time Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “The New Journalism,” in a 1973 collection, it was already dying, killed by poor imitation, the growth of television – which enervated the lively magazine world – and its own self-indulgent weaknesses.

This is the story Marc Weingarten tells in his lively new book, “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution” (Crown, 314 pages, $25). He focuses on a period from 1965 to 1972 when the new journalistic world was dawning and magazines like Esquire, Rolling Stone, and New York (originally the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune) were publishing remarkable pieces by writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer.

Any group that could encompass Mr. Wolfe, Thompson, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer, and Gay Talese beggars description. Acknowledging that the New Journalism was not really a “movement” in any real sense, Mr. Weingarten defines it as “journalism that reads like fiction and rings with the truth of reported fact.” Its practitioners believed that new styles of reporting were required to deal with the upheavals of the period; just-the-facts writing could not explain Vietnam, civil rights, the “youth culture,” and all the rest.

What was needed was a new kind of nonfiction that would reject the rules of reporting and inject something to give it life. What that something was depended on who you asked, and Mr. Weingarten does not really attempt to distinguish between Mr. Wolfe’s energetic use of punctuation, Mr. Mailer’s drunken belligerence, and Mr. Breslin’s “impressionistic rogue’s tales,” or to explain which represented the New Journalism’s essence.

Whatever it was, the New Journalism certainly wasn’t new. As Mr. Weingarten notes, in the late 1940s and 1950s a number of journalists were reporting in a style that combined the vividness of fiction with (ideally) the accuracy of straight reporting. There are earlier antecedents; George Orwell, for example, whom Mr. Weingarten discusses in an opening chapter, combined the sort of fictionalized account with fact reporting in “Homage to Catalonia” and “Down and Out in Paris and London,” though Rebecca West and Truman Capote should also be mentioned for utilizing these techniques.

The main figures of the New Journalism applied these influences to the frenetic cultural circumstances in which they found themselves, “blurring facts and characters like a watercolorist to arrive at some greater emotional or philosophical truth.” Mr. Weingarten provides a readable summary of their backgrounds and experiences, and gives us some sense of the excitement that must have accompanied the original publication of the newest Didion or Wolfe.

Lurking behind the New Journalists themselves were the editors that made the work possible, and Mr. Weingarten does a service by giving them the space they deserve. Harold Hayes of Esquire, Clay Felker of New York, and (later) Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone put up with these erratic and maddening figures and published their essays, often at extraordinary length. It was not unusual for features to spread over more than one issue, or occupy a single one entirely. There are not many magazines today that would devote an entire issue to anything – September 11, 2001, being the exception that proves the rule.

It is easy to exaggerate the achievements of the New Journalism. Great pieces were written, yes, and they seemed at the time to bring a fresh perspective. But a lot of it was pretentious, not a little of it nonsense. What would have been dismissed as self-aggrandizing pabulum in another time was mistaken for insight. Mr. Weingarten too often conflates the merit of the writing with some merit in the underlying events themselves.

So, for example, Mr. Mailer’s “Armies of the Night,” which recounts his experiences during the 1967 march on the Pentagon, is given prominence in part because Mr. Weingarten sees the cause as just. He notes that Mr. Mailer was “capable of empathetic feelings for his enemies, even if they are merciless oppressors.” The inability to distinguish between police doing their jobs and “merciless oppressors” was a general flaw in the 1960s “protest movement” and in the New Journalism.

Mr. Wolfe was perhaps the first to note this ideological blind spot in the New Journalism. Three years before he named the movement, in a coruscating article in New York titled “Radical Chic: Dinner at Lenny’s,” he lambasted the fashionable leftism and cocktail-party revolutionaries that dominated the culture and trumpeted their supposed speaking of truth to power.

The occasion for the piece was a Black Panther benefit sponsored by Leonard Bernstein and his wife, and the essay crushed the pretensions of the fashionable lefties. It also revealed a divide between the New Journalism’s practitioners – Mr. Breslin, for example, criticized the piece. Mr. Wolfe turned toward the novel as a tool to examine the class-consciousness of American society and the hypocrisy of the liberal elites. New York magazine – even before Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1977 – took on the same subject from a different angle, and began exploiting the eternal status-seeking of New Yorkers with high-end consumer goods and top 10 lists. The writing was on the wall for the New Journalism.

Mr. Weingarten is hopeful that today the New Journalism’s “art of narrative storytelling is alive and well; it’s just more diffuse now, spread out across books, magazines, newspapers, and the Web,” and he names such writers as Jon Krakauer as heirs. Narrative storytelling, however, has been around for millennia. The New Journalism’s legacy is sadly the watered-down celebrity profile and the slightly ironic, first-person features that are a staple in today’s general-interest magazines.

Mr. Weingarten fails to recognize that the New Journalism’s brief efflorescence relied on the surrounding political and social currents. His account suggests that the New Journalists were just as much a part of that culture as their subjects were, and the idealism of the 1960s led to the “Me Decade” (the title of a 1976 Wolfe piece). While good storytellers will be in demand in any age, only the 1960s could have produced a Hunter S. Thompson.

Mr. Russello last wrote in these pages on the history of Wall Street.