The New New Journalism | By Robert S. Boynton

The first time Ted Conover was asked if he was a tramp he wasn't sure how to respond. The son of a successful lawyer, Conover had been jumping on and off trains for months, riding the rails as research for his college anthropology thesis. In fact, he had entered the life so completely that when another tramp tried to jump into his boxcar (a violation of hobo etiquette), Conover barely hesitated before stepping on the man's hand, sending him flying off the moving train. "I guess I am," he answered uneasily, all too aware of the vast expanse--economic, social, intellectual--separating him from his veteran-tramp interlocutor.
It is this expanse that Conover has spent the last two decades exploring, in Rolling Nowhere (1984), Coyotes (1987), Whiteout (1991), and Newjack (2000). Together, they have cemented Conover's reputation as one of the finest participatory journalists of his generation.
Those who have read only one or two of Conover's works might cubbyhole him as the bard of gritty, rough-and-tumble subcultures. While not untrue, the description is incomplete. It obscures Conover's real subject: the fine lines separating "us" from "them," and the elaborate rituals and markers--"parts of town, railroad tracks and boulevards, places in the heart and mind," he writes in Coyotes--that we have developed to bolster such distinctions.
Without sacrificing the commitment of the early-twentieth-century muckrakers, or the gusto of the nineteenth-century literary adventurers in whose footsteps he walks, Conover combines "a sociologist's eye for detail with a novelist's sense of drama and compassion," as The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani wrote of Coyotes.
Born in 1958 in Okinawa, Japan, where his father was stationed as a navy pilot, Conover was raised in an affluent Denver neighborhood. In 1980, after three years of studying anthropology at Amherst, he proposed to ride the rails for his senior thesis. Rolling Nowhere was published in 1984.
In Coyotes Conover expanded on an insight he had gained writing Rolling Nowhere: "Mexican farm workers were the new American hoboes." For Coyotes, Conover crossed the U.S.-Mexican border four times, traveling with migrant workers through California, Arizona, Idaho, and Florida.
Back in New York, Conover was rankled at a cocktail party when a friend introduced him as "Ted Conover, a writer who makes his living sleeping on the ground." The accuracy of the remark disturbed him and he began to wonder whether his participant-observer method could be used to write about people who weren't remote or poor. The result was, Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, in which he observed Aspen's celebrity culture from his perches as a local cab driver and reporter at the Aspen Times.
In the early nineties, Conover asked the New York State Department of Correctional Services for permission to write an article for The New Yorker in which he would follow a guard through training. When his formal request was rejected, Conover applied for a job as a guard, carefully navigating the ethical and legal minefield of undercover reporting. Newjack won the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Conover was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and is at work on a book about roads.