From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America

By Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Book Overview

Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before he published his first book of poems. Mark Twain pursued a twenty-year career as a journalist before the publication of his first novel. The list of great imaginative writers whose careers began in journalism includes not only Whitman and Twain, but also Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, among others. Fishkin's book--the first full-length study to examine this tradition in American letters--focuses on the lives and careers of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, in order to discover the roots of their greatest imaginative works and the factors that led each writer to turn to fiction. Fishkin determines that they all turned to fiction because they wished to engage their readers in ways not possible through conventional journalism, and yet not one of them found his artistic stride until he returned, in new and creative ways, to the subjects and strategies first explored as a journalist. Fishkin weaves together threads of biography, literary criticism, literary theory, and social history to reveal the neglected role journalism has played in shaping American literary tradition since the 1830s. Her final chapter examines the attitudes toward journalism and fiction, and the division between the two in the works of such contemporary fiction writers as Norman Mailer, John Hersey, and E.L. Doctorow. Fishkin's probing examination of the poetry and fiction that followed the newspaper and magazine work of Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Dos Passos both reveals how each writer transformed fact into art and how journalism has helped to give a distinctively American cast to American literature.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801825466
• ISBN13: 9780801825460
• Release Date: June 1985
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Sharply informative, original and engaging

Truth in reviewing: I am proud to have once known the author in high school, but that was a distant time, another place. It is coincidental that she has become a preeminent interpreter of our literary and cultural heritage and I have become a consumer of her kind of information. I would have picked up this book and enjoyed it no matter who wrote it. Originally published in 1989, the award-winning FROM FACT TO FICTION remains a fresh and original study of five major American literary figures who leaped the seeming divide between journalism and imaginative writing: Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway and Dos Passos. Of the five, all but Dos Passos began as journalists committed to telling the truth of human experience and then went on to find another way to tell it through poetry and fiction. Dos Passos, the Harvard graduate who was producing fiction and poetry all along, really did not come into his own with the USA trilogy until after his magazine career covering Spain and, especially, the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Against a back drop of American journalism history, the author closely reads how factual reporting influenced the writers' later imaginative work. In the epilogue, she contemplates that while journalistic techniques have successfully contributed to some of our enduring creative literature, the pursuit of truth has not been served by journalists who invented stories and tried to pass them off as factual. The Janet Cook scandal had recently broken when the book was written. The author is a gifted writer who adheres to the rigor of scholarship but writes engagingly in a way that general readers can enjoy. She understands that our American literary heritage belongs to everyone. Her reading of the classics brings them closer and stirs wonder. She currently teaches at Stanford University. A leading Mark Twain scholar, she discovered his lost play, "Is He Dead?" and has, at the time of this writing, co-produced it on Broadway to critical acclaim.