Non-fiction novel
Encyclopedia
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

 which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events narrated woven together with fictitious
Fictitious
For literary uses see FictionFor Legal uses see legal fiction*Fictitious defendants*Feigned action*Ejectment - an action to recover land*John Doe - commonly named as a fictitious defendant....

 allegations and using the storytelling techniques of fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...

. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely-defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to as or faction, a portmanteau of "fact" and "fiction".

Genre established

Geoffrey of Monmouth
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Geoffrey of Monmouth was a cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur...

 was a successful faction writer in the 12th century, and later the historian Holinshed was led into error by treating Geoffrey of Monmouth's writings as truth.

In modern literature, it is commonly thought that this genre was formally established with the 1965 publication of Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...

's In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood (book)
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by American author Truman Capote detailing the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife and two of their four children. Two older daughters no longer lived at the farm and were not there at the time of the murders...

. That the genre was widely recognized in 1965 is undeniable, but influences on the genre can be traced much earlier.

Works of history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 or biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 have often used the narrative devices of fiction to depict real-world events. Scholars have suggested that Operación Masacre
Operación Masacre
Operación Masacre is a nonfiction novel of investigative journalism, written by noted Argentine journalist and author Rodolfo Walsh. It is considered by some to be the first of its genre...

(1957) by Argentine
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 author and journalist Rodolfo Walsh
Rodolfo Walsh
Rodolfo Jorge Walsh was an Argentine writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism. He is most famous for his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta which he wrote the day before his murder, protesting that their economic policies were having an even greater effect on...

 was the first non-fiction novel.

Capote's In Cold Blood

Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...

 was one of the first authors who was recognized for faction writing. Capote read the story of the Clutter murders in a newspaper and was immediately hooked. He used the events surrounding the crime as a basis for In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by Truman Capote.In Cold Blood may also refer to:* In Cold Blood , a 1967 film and 1996 miniseries, both based on the book* In Cold Blood...

. He spent years tracking the story and spent considerable time with the people involved. He watched hours of video footage, listened to recordings, and read transcripts and notes. He once claimed that everything within the book would be true, word for word. Although this is impossible, the majority of information is accurate and extremely detailed. Capote was able to interview the murderers, Richard Hickock
Richard Hickock
Richard "Dick" Eugene Hickock was one of two ex-convicts who murdered the four members of the Herbert Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959, a crime made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood...

 and Perry Smith
Perry Smith (murderer)
Perry Edward Smith was one of two ex-convicts who murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, United States on November 15, 1959, a crime made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood.-Family and early life:Perry Edward Smith was born in Huntington,...

. This meant that he was able to establish their characters, making the details within the book extremely accurate. The way in which the book is written objectively means that Capote has little influence into the text, the influence that he does have is that of emotional manipulation.

Capote argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

 narration and, ideally, free of any mention of the novelist. After the publication of In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood (book)
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by American author Truman Capote detailing the brutal 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife and two of their four children. Two older daughters no longer lived at the farm and were not there at the time of the murders...

, many authors tested the form's "original" concept; notably including Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...

 (1966's Hell's Angels), Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

 (1968's Armies of the Night
Armies of the Night
The Armies of the Night is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning nonfiction novel written by Norman Mailer and sub-titled History as a Novel/The Novel as History. Mailer essentially creates his own genre for the narrative, split into historicized and novelized accounts of the October...

) and Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

 (1968's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the "nonfiction novel" tells the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters...

).

Recent examples

Another example of faction is the book According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...

. This book describes the last few years of Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

's life as seen through the eyes of Queeney Thrale, eldest daughter of Henry Thrale
Henry Thrale
Henry Thrale was an 18th century English Member of Parliament and a close friend of Samuel Johnson. Like his father, he was the proprietor of the large London brewery, H. Thrale & Co....

 and Hester Thrale
Hester Thrale
Hester Lynch Thrale was a British diarist, author, and patron of the arts. Her diaries and correspondence are an important source of information about Samuel Johnson and 18th-century life.-Biography:Thrale was born at Bodvel Hall, Caernarvonshire, Wales...

.

In Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

's school of New Journalism
New Journalism
New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included...

 (often characterized as an invention of the mid-sixties), the novel is hybridized with journalistic narration, which, like Capote's prose, places little emphasis on the process of narration (though Wolfe, unlike Capote, occasionally narrates from first-person). Thompson's approach of "Gonzo Journalism
Gonzo journalism
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to be first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style...

" abandoned Capote's narrative style to intermingle personal experiences and observations with more traditional journalism.

Other examples include the story of author Alex Haley
Alex Haley
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an African-American writer. He is best known as the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the coauthor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.-Early life:...

 and his entire family history for 9 generations in the book Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the U.S....

, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a non-fiction work by John Berendt. Published in 1994, the book was Berendt's first, and became a The New York Times bestseller for 216 weeks following its debut....

by John Berendt
John Berendt
John Berendt is an American author, known for writing the best-selling non-fiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction....

, and The Executioner's Song
The Executioner's Song
The Executioner's Song is a 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah for murder. The title of the book may be a play on "The Lord High Executioner's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado...

by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

.

In the 1970s, authors began to re-publish essays or articles by uniting episodic works into a more cohesive whole, such as Michael Herr
Michael Herr
Michael Herr is a writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches , a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine during the Vietnam War...

's non-fiction novel, Dispatches
Dispatches (book)
Dispatches is a New Journalism book by Michael Herr that describes the author's experiences in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. First published in 1977, Dispatches was one of the first pieces of American literature that allowed Americans to understand the experiences of soldiers...

, which reflected on the journalist's reporting from Vietnam.

Reduced usage

Since the '70s, the non-fiction novel has somewhat fallen out of favor. However, forms such as the extended essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

, the memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...

, and the biography (and autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

) can explore similar territory: Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation...

, for instance, has never called her own work a "non-fiction novel," while she has been repeatedly credited for doing so with what she generally calls "extended" or "long" essays.

Later works classified as non-fiction novels include The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey: A Nonfiction Novel by Bland Simpson, published in 1993, which tells the dramatic story of the disappearance of nineteen-year-old Nell Cropsey from her riverside home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in November 1901. A Civil Action
A Civil Action
A Civil Action is a 1998 American drama film starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall, based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Harr...

by Jonathan Harr, published in 1996, described the drama caused by a real-life water contamination scandal in Massachusetts in the 1980s. And In the Time of the Butterflies
In the Time of the Butterflies
In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical novel by Julia Alvarez, relating an account of the Mirabal sisters during the time of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. The book is written in the first and third person, by and about the Mirabal sisters...

by Julia Alvarez
Julia Álvarez
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. Born in New York of Dominican descent, she spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father's involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country.Alvarez rose to...

, fictionalized the lives of the Mirabal sisters
Mirabal sisters
The Mirabal sisters were four Dominican political dissidents who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Three of the sisters were assassinated by unknown persons...

 who gave their lives fighting a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...

, based on their accounts.

Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

's Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night
Armies of the Night
The Armies of the Night is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning nonfiction novel written by Norman Mailer and sub-titled History as a Novel/The Novel as History. Mailer essentially creates his own genre for the narrative, split into historicized and novelized accounts of the October...

is perhaps the most critically appreciated non-fiction novel, a narrative which is split into a history and a novel, and which autobiographically recounts the March on the Pentagon in 1967 from the third person.

Controversies

In her novel The Secret River
The Secret River
The Secret River, written by Kate Grenville in 2005, is a historical fiction about an early 19th century Englishman transported to Australia for theft. The story explores what may have happened when Europeans colonised land already inhabited by Aboriginal people. The book is also one of careful...

, Australian author Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville is one of Australia's best-known authors. She's published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and four books about the writing process....

 was accused by historians Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen
Inga Clendinnen
Inga Vivienne Clendinnen AO is an Australian author and historian, anthropologist and academic.-Life and career:Born in Geelong, Victoria, Clendinnen graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1955 with a BA...

 of distorting history.

I Married Wyatt Earp

After her husband Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was an American gambler, investor, and law enforcement officer who served in several Western frontier towns. He was also at different times a farmer, teamster, bouncer, saloon-keeper, miner and boxing referee. However, he was never a drover or cowboy. He is most well known...

's death, Josephine Earp
Josephine Earp
Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp was an American part time actress and dancer who was best known as the wife of famed Old West lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp. Known as "Sadie" to the public in 1881, she met Wyatt in the frontier boom town Tombstone, Arizona Territory when she was living with Cochise...

 sought to get her own life story published. When she refused to be more forthcoming about details of her life in Tombstone, her collaborators gave up and Josephine asked them to burn all the copies. Wyatt's cousins Mabel Earp Carson held back a copy, which amateur historian Glen Boyer eventually acquired the rights to.

The University of Arizona Press published it in 1967 as a memoir I Married Wyatt Earp
I Married Wyatt Earp
The book I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus, first published by the University of Arizona Press in 1976, was sold as a memoir of Josephine Earp, the widow of western Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp. It was regarded for many years as a factual account that shed...

giving Josephine Earp credit as the author. In the book's epilogue, Boyer said he integrated two sources, Josephine's and a second, the so-called "Clum manuscript", which he said had been written by The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum
John Clum
John Philip Clum was an Indian agent for the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in the Arizona Territory. He implemented a limited form of self-government on the reservation that was so successful that other reservations were closed and their residents moved to San Carlos. Clum later became the...

 based on conversations with Josephine.

In the 1980s, critics began to question his sources and methods. When Boyer could not prove the existence of the Clum manuscript, he equivocated, saying that he did not receive the Clum manuscript from Colyn after all, instead it was given to him by one of Earp's nieces. Then he changed his story further, saying, "the Clum manuscript is a generic term," Boyer told Wildcat student-reporter Ryan Gabrielson. "This-in addition (to other source materials)-was supported by literally hundreds, maybe thousands of letters and documents."

When confronted will allegations that his book was a hoax, Boyer said he had been misunderstood. "My work is beginning to be recognized by all but a few fanatics and their puppets as a classic example of the newly recognized genre 'creative non-fiction.'" In March 2000 the University of Arizona Press removed the book from their catalog.

External links

  • 1966 interview of Capote by George Plimpton
    George Plimpton
    George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...


See also

  • Creative nonfiction
    Creative nonfiction
    Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact, but is not primarily written in service...

  • Docufiction
    Docufiction
    Docufiction is a neologism which refers to the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction. More precisely, it is a documentary contaminated with fictional elements, in real time, filmed when the events take place, and in which someone - the character - plays his own role in real life...

  • Historical Fiction
    Historical fiction
    Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...

  • List of genres
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