Introduction


The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
--Oscar Wilde

"Nobody who loves to hunt feels absolutely hunky-dory when the quarry goes down," wrote Thomas McGuane in his now classic "The Heart of the Game," published in Outside's inaugural issue twenty years ago and reprinted here. " The remorse spins out almost before anything and the balancing act ends on one declination or another. I decided that unless I become a vegetarian, I'll get my meat by hunting for it. . . . I've seen slaughterhouses, and anyway, as Sitting Bull said, when the buffalo are gone, we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we want our freedom."

Freedom was what Outside's editors sought as well, as that first issue made abundantly clear. In this particular landscape, freedom meant an editorial ability to range near and far: Alongside McGuane's elegant, richly personal consideration of hunting were an article on the shock-troop ethos of Greenpeace; an examination of the egg; a melancholy report from paradise lost on the island of Kauai; reviews of the Minox 35EL camera, the Hi-Roller cowboy hat from Texas Hatters, and The Hallucinogenic and Poisonous Mushroom Guide; and a decidedly short story (188 words) by Richard Brautigan about a bicyclist and two dogs on a roof. Obviously no one was looking to get typecast at Outside; not only would the magazine entertain a full array of subjects, but it would also air a wide spectrum of opinion as well--the better to keep the reader guessing and preserve, as editor-at-large David Quammen would put it years later, "the cacophonous disunity of souls." The one fixed ...