True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism

by Norman Sims, Ted Conover

Overview

Journalism in the twentieth century was marked by the rise of literary journalism. Sims traces more than a century of its history, examining the cultural connections, competing journalistic schools of thought, and innovative writers that have given literary journalism its power. Seminal examples of the genre provide ample context and background for the study of this style of journalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810124691
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	01/16/2008
Series:	Medill Visions Of The American Press
Edition description:	1
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

NORMAN SIMS is a professor of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts, the editor of The Literary Journalists  and Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, and the co-editor with Mark Kramer of Literary Journalism.

TED CONOVER is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. 

 

Read an Excerpt

TRUE STORIES

A CENTURY OF LITERARY JOURNALISM

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By Norman Sims
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2007

Norman Sims
All right reserved.


ISBN: 978-0-8101-2469-1

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Chapter One A TRUE STORY

What a word is truth-slippery, tricky, unreliable. -Lillian Hellman

"It reads like a novel."

This statement has been used to compliment and unintentionally to insult literary journalism.

Novels, by definition, are invented prose narratives. The creative invention of characters, events, plot, dialogue, and details has defined the realistic novel since Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, which was labeled "A True History" on the cover of the first edition in 1688. The early 1700s saw an upsurge of books whose authors claimed their stories were true, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Labels became tricky after readers started distinguishing between the novel and nonfiction. Defoe's The Tempest was long taken as fiction, and his Journal of the Plague Year as fact, but the reverse was closer to reality. Defoe used plain vernacular language and often employed a bumbling style that looped back on itself and forced his narrator to make self-corrections. His ordinary language seemed free of guile. Readers reacted by helping out, by believing.

Reading a nonfiction book that tells gripping stories with emotional complexity may be an experience similar to reading a novel. Stephen Crane, one of the most celebrated journalists at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote on both sides of the great fact-fiction divide. Michael Robertson argued in an excellent book, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, that our modern distinctions between journalism and fiction "have distorted our readings of many of Crane's works." Robertson described a literary world where the newspaper and novels "were covering the same terrain." As Robertson explained, departmentalization and sharp distinctions have become much more rigid today than they were in the nineteenth century.

The border guards are much stricter today. The invention of details destroys journalism, and it can be damaging to forms that typically have looser standards, such as memoir and autobiography. The greatest controversies in the history of literary journalism-particularly during the New Journalism era of the 1960s-have involved the accuracy of reports.

Since 1981, I have been interviewing literary journalists about their craft. Not one of those writers ever said it was all right to make up anything. Accuracy is the foremost requirement for them.

Several writers have revealed their annoyance when their literary journalism is confused with the novel.

Tracy Kidder had just won the general nonfiction Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine when I interviewed him in the cramped office of his rural New England home. Tall and slim, he had the build of a tight end in football, which he had been. Kidder always displays a no-nonsense intensity. A few days before our first interview, a local newspaper piece about the Pulitzer Prize mistakenly had called his book a "novel." Kidder was bemused. "If the story's true, if the dialogue's not invented, then it's journalism," he said. "I don't know what you call the stuff that appears to be hybrid. To me there's journalism and there's fiction. I say it has to be true. Sometimes you have to change names but that's risky."

A few years later, Richard Todd, the former executive editor of The Atlantic who edits Kidder's books, said that literary journalism "holds the promise of taking us to worlds we don't ordinarily visit and to make them real," which is increasingly something the novel does not do. Unlike the realistic novel, literary journalism has to be factual.

"I don't see why it's so hard to understand, yet it's a constant source of confusion and curiosity," Susan Orlean, a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Orchid Thief, told another interviewer. "I find it really funny. I very often will have The Orchid Thief referred to as a novel, and it drives me crazy."

John McPhee-noted for more than thirty carefully crafted books that range among topics as widespread as airplanes, oranges, geology, Alaska, efforts to control nature, nuclear weapons, shad fishing, trains, trucks, and canoes-takes great care, along with The New Yorker fact-checkers, to assure that everything in his books is accurate. McPhee and Kidder could be related-except that McPhee is about a foot shorter-in that they both have a precise and articulate manner of speaking, and oftentimes they write in a similar style. The separate realms of fiction and journalism were on McPhee's mind when I first met him in his Princeton University office.

"There are things you don't do, things you can do, and things you can't do," McPhee told me.

What you don't do, for example, is make a composite character. Where I came from, a composite character was a fiction. So when somebody makes a nonfiction character out of three people who are real, that is a fictional character in my opinion. And you don't get inside their heads and think for them. You can't interview the dead. You could make a list of the things you don't do. Where writers abridge that, they hitchhike on the credibility of writers who don't. And they blur something that ought to be distinct. When people talk about "the line is blurring between fiction and nonfiction," what I see in that image is that we don't know where fiction stops and fact begins. That violates a contract with the reader.

Presumed contracts with readers have been broken or challenged several times in recent history. Some examples:

An "autobiography" called The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter was on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list in 1991. The presumed contract in autobiography permits some recollections and even quotations that might never be confirmed, such as what your mother said to you when you were eight years old, as well as some inevitable self-promotion. This went beyond the contract. Supposedly the autobiography of a Cherokee boy, The Education of Little Tree was actually written by Asa Earl Carter, who was white, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, and a racist speechwriter for former Alabama Governor George Wallace. After the New York Times found out about the hoax, the book moved from the nonfiction bestseller list to the fiction list without comment.

Michael Finkel's cover article, "Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?" in the New York Times Magazine of November 18, 2001, told the story of a fifteen-year-old boy in West Africa who sold himself into servitude believing he might acquire a pair of shoes. Finkel's impressionistic feature contained not a single quotation. David Hayes, a Canadian literary journalist, said he had the article at a copy shop preparing to hand it out to a magazine class when the scandal broke. It turned out that Finkel, under pressure from Times editors to write a more dramatic piece, created a composite character named Youssouf Malé-a real person, one of many Finkel interviewed, but Malé did not have the experiences related in the article. An aid worker with Save the Children Canada identified the boy pictured on the cover of the magazine as another child, not Malé, and that was how Finkel was caught. The article, while based on actual reporting, was fictionalized, breaking several contracts with New York Times readers and with its editors. Finkel lost his job.

Dave Eggers published What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng-A Novel in 2006. Eggers labeled the book a novel, which violates no presumed contract, but it blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. The main character is a Sudanese refugee whose experiences were the starting point for a fictionalized work. In the end, the main character says he understands that people are listening to him. "How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist." But, of course, he existed no more than Finkel's Youssouf Malé. "Novel, autobiography, whatever," said a New York Times reviewer.

A "memoir" titled "The Blood Runs Like a River through My Dreams," by a Native American writer named Nasdijj, ran in the June 1999 issue of Esquire. It recounted the death of a child from fetal alcohol syndrome. Nasdijj followed his initial story with three memoirs of family problems. But Nasdijj was later revealed to be Tim Barrus, whose family history is Scandinavian, not Native American. Esquire revealed the fraud in 2006.

James Frey's "nonfiction memoir" A Million Little Pieces, the story of the author's life as a drug addict, alcoholic, and criminal, was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey for her blockbuster-making book club in 2005. Although Frey said the book was straight nonfiction, several examinations disproved his claims about jail terms and other details. Winfrey confronted him on air and withdrew her recommendation.

Unlike Oprah and the editors of the Times and Esquire, apparently readers did not much care when writers broke the rules of the presumed contracts. The Education of Little Tree has sold 2.5 million copies in its long lifespan, and A Million Little Pieces has sold some 3.5 million copies.

Memoir, autobiography, the genre known in English departments at universities as "creative nonfiction," literary journalism, and even history and science have had similar embarrassing moments. In the world of journalism, accuracy reigns as the supreme clause in the symbolic contract with readers, and the same is true among literary journalists. Some violations by literary journalists of the presumed contract with readers will be noted in this book-including Truman Capote's In Cold Blood-but overall I have always found that literary journalists talk about writing true stories as their primary obligation.

The nature of literary journalism has evolved during the past several decades, and, at best, definitions have always been a bit vague.

Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism, voice, a focus on ordinary people-if for no other reason than that celebrities rarely provide the necessary access-and accuracy. Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered.

A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term "breakable rules" in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:

Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds....

Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor....

Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.

Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

In his edited volume of presentations from the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, Kramer suggests tips for reporting narrative:

Pinpoint your subjects' emotional experience, not your own.

Rigorously research your story's context.

Cherish the structural ideas and metaphors that come to you while you are reporting.

The journal Creative Nonfiction in 2006 gave a list of "The ABCs of CNF" where the use of composite characters was supported, but only with the very important sub-rule: "The key is to let readers know what you are doing and why."

The kind of writing often labeled as literature-meaning fiction-usually departs from the actual details of time and place, and characters are imaginary or injected with made-up thoughts and feelings. Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. In the past century and a half, however, literary journalism has developed as a creature with parents in both camps. Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy-or mostly so-precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary.

In the history of literary journalism that runs from Daniel Defoe in the early 1700s until today, an unusual thing happened in the 1930s. This genre of writing gained a name. A couple of names, to be exact.

In 1937, Edwin H. Ford, who taught in the Department of Journalism at the University of Minnesota, published A Bibliography of Literary Journalism in America. Although the term had been used a couple of times earlier in the century, Ford seems to be the first to use literary journalism with its contemporary scholarly meaning as a form of journalism and not as the product of a journalist who wrote about literature.

"Literary Journalism as conceived for the purpose of this bibliography might be defined as writing which falls within the twilight zone that divides literature from journalism," Ford wrote. "It has the interpretative caste of literature as well as the contemporary interest of journalism." According to Ford, literary journalists create artistic literature that moves beyond political and social trends. "Through the medium of the sketch or essay, of the literary or humorous column, of verse, or of critical comment, he refashions and evaluates the world about him."

Ford's topic was so broad that his bibliography could only "suggest possibilities inherent in a study of literary journalism." He did a pretty good job. He listed Sherwood Anderson, William Bolitho, Malcolm Cowley, H. L. Mencken, Opie Read, Henry David Thoreau, and Brand Whitlock as writers who combined journalism and literature in books. Among humorists, he mentioned Mark Twain, Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, and Ring Lardner. He included novelists Richard Harding Davis, David Graham Phillips, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, who were also leading journalists of the century. The term literary journalism did not catch on in Ford's time, but the period before World War II produced a great deal of literary journalism as well as considerable innovation in the form.

The massive unemployment and suffering of the Great Depression created fertile ground for literary journalism. Ford was correct in saying, "More than ever today is there a need for the literary journalist; for the writer who is sufficiently journalistic to sense the swiftly changing aspects of this dynamic era, and sufficiently literary to gather and shape his material with the eye and the hand of the artist. The theory that a great work of literature takes years to accomplish has yet to be disproved, but such a conception does not imply that the future Titans of literature may not today be writing for magazines, or for newspapers." In the twentieth century, real events were so fantastic as to challenge fiction. The slaughter in the killing fields of Europe during World War I, massive social disruption caused by the Depression, and the atomic bomb and holocaust of World War II challenged writers to portray real events with passion and emotion. It was an equally formidable task for literary journalists as for novelists. Writers would increasingly have difficulty choosing between the two genres.

Ford's term literary journalism was joined at the time by another term: reportage. Literary journalism and reportage overlapped and tended to refer to the same works. Joseph North, editor of New Masses in 1935, defined reportage as "three-dimensional reporting. The writer not only condenses reality, he helps the reader feel the fact. The finest writers of reportage are artists in the fullest sense of the term. They do their editorializing through their imagery." In 1973, William Stott described in his book Documentary Expression and Thirties America "the techniques of documentary reportage," which he noted was called the New Journalism in the seventies. The term reportage was widely used in the thirties and is still used today. In 2003, the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage was established in France. The award's documentation says the art of reportage is "based upon personal experience, perception, and anecdotal evidence, representing a combination of the best of journalism and of creative nonfiction. Outstanding works in this genre have an effect far beyond the situation from which they arose, achieving importance as works of literature." The term reportage has not been popular with everyone. Lillian Ross said in her 2002 memoir, "And the fancy word 'reportage' actually gives me the creeps. The appropriate word is 'reporting.' The word 'reportage' seems to have been taken up in the last century by people who wanted to be thought of more highly. The finest practitioners of reportorial writing are 'writers.'"

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Includes literary pieces by Michael Paterniti, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Joseph Mitchell, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Editorial Reviews

"Literary journalism at its best asks the questions that literature asks." —Ron Rosenbaum

From the Publisher