THE FICTION OF FACTS

IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF FROM FACT 70 FICTION, SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN gives a partial list of the American poets, dramatists, and novelists who began their careers as journalists: "not only Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, but also John Greenleaf Whittier, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, James Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Eugene O'Neill, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, James-Agee, James Weldon Johnson, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, John Hersey, and countless others" (3). The list is remarkable; almost as remarkable is that no critic before Fishkin has explored at length the phenomenon of the reporter-turned-artist. From Fact to Fiction is a welcome initial exploration, an incisive and well-written discussion of the first five authors on Fishkin's list. In her Introduction, Fishkin argues that the link between journalism and imaginative literature since Whitman's time is a way of explaining what is American about American literature. When Philip Rahv wrote that immersion in experience is the leitmotif of the American writer, he made no attempt to account for that urge toward the bare fact; Fishkin suggests that it is American writers' training as reporters that produces their characteristic awe of experience.' She argues that all five of the writers in her survey share a common career outline: first writing good but limited nonfiction, then producing insipid poetry and/or fiction, each ultimately created a masterpiece only when he brought to his imaginative writing elements of his journalistic subject matter and narrative strategy. Emerson called Leaves of Grass "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagavatgeeta and the New York Herald." While critics aplenty have discussed the mystical aspects of Whitman's poetry, Fishkin is probably the first to show his debt to the penny press. Until the 1830s, when the Herald and other penny papers were founded, American newspapers were high-priced journals intended for a small political and financial elite. Aimed at a wide middleand working-class