From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America

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.