I’m returning again after a couple of previous posts (see here the more recent one and here the older one) to the matter of nonfiction, which occupies me because I’m planning to teach an elective subject if not next year, then the following. As I explained in my previous posts, I find the label nonfiction too inclusive and wide-ranging, and I have been wondering how to narrow it down for the purpose of introducing students to what for them is a largely unexplored field.
One possibility is building a syllabus using sub-genres (one biography, one autobiography, a book of memoirs, a travelogue, and so on). The other is focusing, as I think I am going to do, on what truly interests me, if only because the subgenres of nonfiction writing are so many. Here’s the funny thing: until last week I though that what I most enjoy reading and would like to teach is creative nonfiction, when what I actually love reading is literary journalism. I feel quite sheepish that I am only beginning to understand the basics of the label literally today.
I’ll begin by explaining what I mean, which I have only understood after reading Robert S. Boynton’s The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (2005, see the website). Boynton is director of the Literary Reportage program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and his book gathers together interviews with 19 of his guests in his lectures: Ted Conover, Richard Ben Cramer, Leon Dash, William Finnegan, Jonathan Harr, Alex Kotlowitz, Jon Krakauer, Jane Kramer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, Richard Preston, Ron Rosenbaum, Eric Schlosser, Gay Talese, Calvin Trillin, Lawrence Weschler, Lawrence Wright. Apart from the Paris Review interviews, I have never read any other interviews with so much detail about the methodology followed by particular writers, which is in itself highly commendable.
The 19 authors do not always agree that what they write is literary journalism (or creative nonfiction), but there is a certain agreement on terms such as ‘longform reportage’. All are journalists by profession (though not by training) who combine writing long articles for quality US magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, or Esquire with publishing books, which usually expand on their magazine work. The stories and ‘characters’ they write about are not part of the breaking news published in newspapers, but approaches to interesting situations and persons that require a generous investment of time (often of years) and perhaps even an immersive situation, or at least, a constant presence. All 19 agree that literary journalism is typically American for two main reasons: the nation has always been interested in the facts of its own existence, and the magazines have played a key role in the development of a journalism adapted to explain those facts at leisure.
This does not mean at all that literary journalism is not found in other nations (see John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds’s The Routledge Companion to World Literary Journalism, 2023). Just that US literary journalism has a clearly defined tradition and has gone first through the process of self-examination and of academic analysis. The self-examination started arguably with Truman Capote’s labelling of his own In Cold Blood (1960) as a ‘nonfiction novel’, It reached another turning point in the publication by flamboyant journalist Tom Wolfe of the 1973 anthology The New Journalism, with texts by Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others, himself included. Wolfe’s introduction operated as a sort of manifesto, not without controversy. The Wikipedia article claims that this movement, if it can be called a movement, was over in the early 1980s, but the fact is that new journalism did not really die then, just as it was not really born in 1973 (perhaps it goes all the way back to Addison and Steele in 18th century England). In fact, literary journalism (or new new journalism in Boynton’s labelling) became a solid presence, endorsed by its increasing presence in the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Awards though it often appears mixed with other nonfiction genres, such as the biography, the historiographic essay, or even the popular science volume.
I have hesitated to write ‘popular science’ because Elizabeth Kolbert’s phenomenal The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) a Pulitzer Prize winner, is literary journalism, if only because the author is a journalist. In contrast, Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring (1962), a book without which Kolbert’s volume might never have been published, is the work of a scientist and, so, properly speaking, popular science aimed at a general audience (unless academic volumes). As you can see, the genre distinctions are quite wobbly, and this is a major problem when considering nonfiction.
An additional problem is the fact that the label creative nonfiction appears far more frequently in guides and handbooks addressed to aspiring writers than in academic analysis. There is not, for instance, a companion to nonfiction, even though there are companions to prose, the essay, autobiography, travel writing and, indeed, American literary journalism, which I need to read pronto (there is also an International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, with its corresponding journal). In fact, in view of this academic diversity and resistance to using the keyword nonfiction, I wonder why booksellers, publishers and awards still use this rather clumsy label. As an example, see the new Women’s Prize for Nonfiction. The six finalists mix the historiographic non-academic essay, literary journalism, the memoir (3 of the volumes) and a hybrid as crazy and wonderful as Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
So, back to my subject: what do I want students to read? Well, as happens I will start teaching next year a new fourth-year compulsory course called Modern English Literature: 20th and 21st Centuries, and I am thinking of allowing each student to choose four/five different books to read in different categories, one of which will be nonfiction. I just don’t think I can sum up 50 years in a few books; that feels fine for the 19th century but not for the sumptuous publishing panorama of the living author. Since the other books will be fiction (one British, one transnational [non UK, non US], one genre fiction including the USA), I will not make distinctions between subcategories of nonfiction. I will most likely provide a list for students to choose from. In contrast, if I ever manage to teach the elective subject I have been planning for years, my focus will definitely be Anglophone literary journalism. Again, I will most likely invite each student to choose from a list a few books. I can already tell you that the list will include best-selling, quality volumes such as Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief or Patrick Keefe’s Empire of Pain, the kind of narrative that you enjoy because you learn from it facts from real life. As the authors that Boynton interviewed agreed, in literary journalism the author might not tell the whole truth, for who can?, but they have an obligation to report instead of allowing themselves to invent, as it is done in fiction.
A problem I need to solve somehow is that not even Boynton in his volume can establish a clear-cut starting date for ‘new new journalism’. I have already taught (in a course on globalization and its US critique) Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a book published in 2001 but previously serialized by Rolling Stone in 1999. If, however, I start with this book, and focus in the 21st century as I usually do in subjects on contemporary writing, I am leaving out Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), expanded from the article “Death of an Innocent” (published in 1993 by Outside). If I crawl back into the 1990s, I’m sure I’ll get to the 1980s and eventually to Tom Wolfe; perhaps The Right Stuff (1979), his famous book on the Mercury and Apollo programme astronauts marks the departure from New Journalism, with its more sedate style. Nothing to do with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Perhaps the proof that New Journalism was never what Wolfe suggested is the continuity in style in Gay Talese’s long career, which continues today with Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener (2023) having started with New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (1961); please read The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (1964).
During my intense search for information this afternoon, I have come across some surprises indeed. The main one is that, typically, I didn’t know that my own university has an MA in Journalism for Literature, Communication and Humanities, with several subjects on literary journalism. They look nothing like the subject I am planning, which is a relief as I have suddenly felt myself intruding into someone else’s field. I am not sure of the actual statistics, but I would say that most of the academic work on literary journalism which I have come across has been authored by teachers of journalism in Schools of Journalism and in Media Studies programmes, not in English. Boynton announces very optimistically in his 2005 volume that literary journalists and novelists will soon be seen as parts of an equally respectable category of writers, yet this has not happened so far. I have the same impression as with documentary films, which are today far more interesting than fiction films, but still treated as second-rate products. The same happens to literary journalism, perhaps because originating mainly in magazines it is seen as an ephemeral product. Just an idea to mull over.
I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, take a look at this mixed bag of great nonfiction and find the next book to read. I’ll recommend, why not?, one of them: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), about the Black woman whose cancerous cells got stolen and are still alive in most labs in the world doing research on cancer. Beats any novel if you ask me…