The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting

November 27, 2023
Gutkind (My Last Eight-Thousand Days), founder of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction, provides an enlightening critical history of the genre. He finds the seeds of creative nonfiction in such genre-defying works as Daniel Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year, which recreated the 1665 Great Plague of London through the eyes of a fictional narrator. Elsewhere, Gutkind notes that decades before Tom Wolfe gained fame as a practitioner of New Journalism, reporters Marvel Cooke and Ida B. Wells were employing the genre’s defining techniques (writing in scenes, strong authorial voice) in their reportage on life in New York City and lynching in the American South. Thoughtfully probing controversies stirred up by creative nonfiction, Gutkind recounts how New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm’s presentation of interviews she’d conducted with an embattled psychoanalyst over the course of months as taking place over a single meal, and adjustment of quotations to sell the illusion, resulted in a protracted legal battle after her subject sued for misrepresenting him (the case was decided in Malcolm’s favor). The literary history fascinates, though Gutkind’s accounts of arguing with his colleagues in the University of Pittsburgh English department on behalf of creative nonfiction’s merits drag in comparison. Still, it adds up to a thorough appraisal of the genre.