This course introduces students to works by some of the most influential literary journalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Classes will be devoted to individual literary-journalistic genres: the personal essay, the profile, the polemic, the memoir, literary reportage, and cultural criticism. Students will look closely at key writers who worked across these genres: George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates. Over the semester, students will develop and write a feature-length work of literary journalism in a genre of their choice, to be refined through peer workshop and instructor feedback.