literary journalism essay meaning

What Is Literary Journalism?

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• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
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• B.A., English, State University of New York

Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with narrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction. This form of writing can also be called  narrative journalism or new journalism . The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative nonfiction ; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.

In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists , Norman Sims observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."

Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee , Jane Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the past include Stephen Crane, Henry Mayhew , Jack London , George Orwell , and Tom Wolfe.

Characteristics of Literary Journalism

There is not exactly a concrete formula that writers use to craft literary journalism, as there is for other genres, but according to Sims, a few somewhat flexible rules and common features define literary journalism. "Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism , voice , a focus on ordinary people ... and accuracy.

"Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered. A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term 'breakable rules' in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:

• Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds...
• Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor...
• Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.
• Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

... Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. ... Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy—or mostly so—precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary." 

Why Literary Journalism Is Not Fiction or Journalism

The term "literary journalism" suggests ties to fiction and journalism, but according to Jan Whitt, literary journalism does not fit neatly into any other category of writing. "Literary journalism is not fiction—the people are real and the events occurred—nor is it journalism in a traditional sense.

"There is interpretation, a personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those who are affected by those institutions."

The Role of the Reader

Because creative nonfiction is so nuanced, the burden of interpreting literary journalism falls on readers. John McPhee, quoted by Sims in "The Art of Literary Journalism," elaborates: "Through dialogue , words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in creative writing. A writer simply gets things started."

Literary Journalism and the Truth

Literary journalists face a complicated challenge. They must deliver facts and comment on current events in ways that speak to much larger big picture truths about culture, politics, and other major facets of life; literary journalists are, if anything, more tied to authenticity than other journalists. Literary journalism exists for a reason: to start conversations.

Literary Journalism as Nonfiction Prose

Rose Wilder talks about literary journalism as nonfiction prose—informational writing that flows and develops organically like a story—and the strategies that effective writers of this genre employ in The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary journalist. "As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical  techniques generally associated with fiction.'

"Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims adds to this definition by suggesting the genre  itself allows readers to 'behold others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.'

"He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least for the interim de facto journalists.'"

She concludes, "Common to many definitions of literary journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth."

Background of Literary Journalism

This distinct version of journalism owes its beginnings to the likes of Benjamin Franklin, William Hazlitt, Joseph Pulitzer, and others. "[Benjamin] Franklin's Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism," begins Carla Mulford. "Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks to the form that literary journalism should take—that it should be situated in the ordinary world—even though her background was not typically found in newspaper writing." 

Literary journalism as it is now was decades in the making, and it is very much intertwined with the New Journalism movement of the late 20th century. Arthur Krystal speaks to the critical role that essayist William Hazlitt played in refining the genre: "A hundred and fifty years before the New Journalists of the 1960s rubbed our noses in their egos, [William] Hazlitt put himself into his work with a candor that would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier."

Robert Boynton clarifies the relationship between literary journalism and new journalism, two terms that were once separate but are now often used interchangeably. "The phrase 'New Journalism' first appeared in an American context in the 1880s when it was used to describe the blend of sensationalism and crusading journalism—muckraking on behalf of immigrants and the poor—one found in the New York World and other papers... Although it was historically unrelated to [Joseph] Pulitzer's New Journalism, the genre of writing that Lincoln Steffens called 'literary journalism' shared many of its goals."

Boynton goes on to compare literary journalism with editorial policy. "As the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in the 1890s, Steffens made literary journalism—artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses—into editorial policy, insisting that the basic goals of the artist and the journalist (subjectivity, honesty, empathy) were the same."

• Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
• Krystal, Arthur. "Slang-Whanger." The New Yorker, 11 May 2009.
• Lane, Rose Wilder.  The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist . Edited by Amy Mattson Lauters, University of Missouri Press, 2007.
• Mulford, Carla. “Benjamin Franklin and Transatlantic Literary Journalism.”  Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 , edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 75–90.
• Sims, Norman. True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism . 1st ed., Northwestern University Press, 2008.
• Sims, Norman. “The Art of Literary Journalism.”  Literary Journalism , edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, Ballantine Books, 1995.
• Sims, Norman. The Literary Journalists . Ballantine Books, 1984.
• Whitt, Jan. Women in American Journalism: A New History . University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• Creative Nonfiction
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Genres in Literature
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?
• A Guide to All Types of Narration, With Examples
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• Interior Monologues
• Characters' Thoughts and Motivations in Psychological Realism
• How to Write a Narrative Essay or Speech
• What You Should Know About Travel Writing
• What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?
• The Difference Between an Article and an Essay
• Examples of Images in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction
• How to Write a Great Book Report
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction

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What is Literary Journalism: a Guide with Examples

Literary journalism is a genre created with the help of a reporter’s inner voice and employing a writing style based on literary techniques. The journalists working in the genre of literary journalism must be able to use the whole literary arsenal: epithets, impersonations, comparisons, allegories, etc. Thus, literary journalism is similar to fiction. At the same time, it remains journalism , which is the opposite of fiction as it tells a true story. The journalist’s task here is not only to inform us about specific events but also to affect our feelings (mainly aesthetic ones) and explore the details that ordinary journalism overlooks.

Characteristics of literary journalism

Modern journalism is constantly changing, but not all changes are good for it (take fake news proliferating thanks to social media , for instance). Contemporary literary journalism differs from its historic predecessor in the following:

• Literary journalism almost completely lost its unity with literature
• Journalists have stopped relying on the literary features of the language and style
• There are fewer and fewer articles in the genre of literary journalism in modern editions
• Contemporary media has lost the need in literary journalism
• The habits of media consumers today are not sophisticated enough for a revival of literary journalism

The most prominent works of literary journalism

With all this, it’s no surprise that we need to go back in time to find worthy examples of literary journalism. Fortunately, it wasn’t until the 1970-s that literary journalism came to an end, so here are 4 great works of the genre that are worth every minute of your attention.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Mark Twain studied journalism from the age of 12 and until the end of his life. It brought him his first glory and a pseudonym and made him a writer. In 1867, Twain (as a correspondent of the newspaper Daily Alta California , San Francisco) went on a sea voyage to Europe, the Middle East, and Egypt. His reports and travel records turned into the book The Innocents Abroad , which made him famous all over the world.

In some sense, American journalism came out of letters that served as an important source of information about life in the colonies. The newspaper has long been characterized by an epistolary subjectivity, and Twain’s book recalls the times when no one thought that neutrality would one day become one of the hallmarks of the “right” journalism.

Of course, Twain’s travel around the Old World was a journey not only through geography but also through the history that Twain resolutely refused to worship. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes not too much, but the more valuable are the lyrical and sublime notes that sound when Twain-the-narrator is truly captivated by something.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)

John Hersey was a war correspondent and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his debut story A Bell for Adano . As a reporter of The New Yorker , he was one of the first journalists from the USA who came to Hiroshima to describe the consequences of the atomic bombing.

Starting with where two doctors, two priests, a seamstress, and a plant employee were and what they were doing at exactly 08:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Hersey describes the year they lived after that. Hersey’s uniform and detached tone seems to be the only appropriate medium in relation to what one would call indescribable and inexpressible. Without allowing himself sentimentality, admiring horrors, or obvious partiality, he doesn’t miss any of the details that add up to a horrible and magnificent picture.

Hiroshima became a sensation due to the formidable brevity of the author’s prose, which tried to give the reader the most explicit (and the most complete) idea of what happened for the first time in mankind’s history

Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood” (1965)

Truman Capote turned to journalism as a young writer looking for a new form of self-expression. He read an article about the murder of the family of a farmer Herbert Clutter in Holcomb City (Kansas) in the newspaper and went there to collect the material. His original idea was to write about how a brutal murder influenced the life of the quiet backwoods. The killers were caught, and Capote decided to use their confessions in his book. He finished it only after the killers were hanged. This way, the six-year story got the finale.

In Cold Blood was published in “The New Yorker” in 1965. Next year it was released as a book that became the benchmark of true crime and a super bestseller. “In Cold Blood” includes:

• A stylistic brilliance.
• Inexorable footsteps of doom destroying both innocent and guilty.
• The horror hidden in a person and waiting for a chance to break out.

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Tomas Wolfe is one of the key figures of literary journalism. Mainly due to his creative and, so to speak, production efforts, “the new journalism” became an essential part of American culture and drew close attention (both critical and academic).

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became one of the hallmarks of this type of journalism with its focus on aesthetic expressiveness (along with documentary authenticity). This is a story about the writer Ken Kesey and his friends and associates’ community, “Merry Pranksters”, who spread the idea of the benefits of expanding consciousness.

Wolfe decided to plunge into the “subjective reality” of the characters and their adventures. To convey them to the reader, he had to “squeeze” the English language: Wolfe changes prose to poetry , dives into the stream of consciousness, and mocks the traditional punctuation. In general, he does just about everything to make a crazy carnival come to life on the pages of his book (without actually participating in it). Compare that with gonzo journalism by Hunter S. Thompson , the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which draws upon some similar themes.

The book’s main part is devoted to the journey of the “pranksters” on a psychedelic propaganda bus and the “acid tests” themselves, which were actually parties where a lot of people took LSD. Wolfe had to use different sources of information to reconstruct these events, and it’s hard to believe that he didn’t experience any of them himself. Yet, no matter how bright his book shines and how much freedom it shows, Wolfe makes it clear that he’s talking about a doomed project and an ending era.

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Literary Journalism

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These resources discuss some terms and techniques that are useful to the beginning and intermediate creative nonfiction writer, and to instructors who are teaching creative nonfiction at these levels. The distinction between beginning and intermediate writing is provided for both students and instructors, and numerous sources are listed for more information about creative nonfiction tools and how to use them. A sample assignment sheet is also provided for instructors.

Literary journalism is another essay form that is best reserved for intermediate and advanced level courses, but it can be incorporated into introductory and composition courses. Literary journalism is the creative nonfiction form that comes closest to newspaper and magazine writing. It is fact-driven and requires research and, often, interviews.

Literary journalism is sometimes called “immersion journalism” because it requires a closer, more active relationship to the subject and to the people the literary journalist is exploring. Like journalistic writing, the literary journalism piece should be well-researched, focus on a brief period of time, and concentrate on what is happening outside of the writer’s small circle of personal experience and feelings.

An Example and Discussion of a Literary Journalism

The following excerpt from George Orwell is a good example of literary journalism. Orwell wrote about the colonial regime in Marrakech. His father was a colonial officer, so Orwell was confronted with the reality of empire from an early age, and that experience is reflected in his literary journalism piece, Marrakech :

Orwell isn’t writing a reflective, personal essay about his travels through Marrakech. Neither is he writing a memoir about what it was like to be the son of a colonial officer, nor how that experience shaped his adult life. He writes in a descriptive way about the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, about the invisibility of the “natives,” and about the way citizenship doesn’t ensure equality under a colonial regime.

Generating Ideas for Literary Journalism

One way to incorporate literary journalism into an introductory or intermediate level course is simply to have students write personal essays first. Then the students can go back and research the facts behind the personal experiences related in their essays. They can incorporate historical data, interviews, or broaden the range of their personal essay by exploring the cultural or political issues hinted at in their personal essays.

If a student writes, in passing, about the first presidential candidate they were eligible to vote for, then they can include facts and figures around that particular election, as well as research other events that were current at that time, for example. As with other essay forms, students should find topics that are important to them.

What is Literary Journalism?

In this article, a journalist explains what is literary journalism and its key conventions.

Literary journalism is a type of writing that uses narrative techniques that are more typical of novels, short stories and other forms of fiction. However, similar to traditional news reporting, it is presenting a factual story to a public audience.

It is also known as creative nonfiction, immersion journalism, narrative journalism and new journalism.

The last of those terms, ‘new journalism’ came about during the 1960s and 70s, when the writings of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, George Plimpton, and Truman Capote, and gonzo journalism , reached the public sphere.

Before reading on, check out our guide to the best journalism tools .

Defining Literary Journalism

Recognizing literary journalism, criticism of literary journalism, the role of literary journalism today, resources for journalists, what is the meaning of literary journalism, why is literary journalism important, what is the difference between literary journalism and other journalism.

Norman Sim’s seminal anthology, The Literary Journalists , included the work of some of those writers. It also tried to define just what a literary journalist is. Within its opening passage, it read:

“The literary journalists are marvelous observers whose meticulous attention to detail is wedded to the tools and techniques of the fiction writer. Like reporters, they are fact gatherers whose material is the real world.

“Like fiction writers, they are consummate storytellers who endow their stories with a narrative structure and a distinctive voice.”

Although the history of literary journalism goes back much further than 1960s, it was then when writers such as Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Gay Talese exposed this style to the masses.

Their work was renowned for its immersive qualities and its ability to build a plot and narrative. Instead of sticking to journalistic formulas, they wrote in their own voice and in a stylistic narrative that was uniquely theirs.

This writing style was not typical of the newspaper articles of the day.

Although their long-form stories and in-depth research was more suited to literature than newspapers, the likes of Esquire and The New Yorker did publish their work with great success.

New Journalism Not Being New

The differences from the common journalism of the 1960s were notable, hence why their work went under an umbrella category known as ‘new journalism’.

That being said, this style was not new at all, with literary journalism already being written in both North America and further afield.

John S. Bak, founding President of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, points to how journalism evolved in different regions, yet when it comes to this form of writing, there are still overlapping traits. He wrote:

“Since journalism in America and in Europe evolved from different traditions, it is only natural that their literary journalism should have done so as well. But the picture of a U.S.-led literary journalism and a European-produced literary reportage is not as clearly demarcated as one would think or hope.”

Literary journalism takes the qualities of both literature and reporting and melds them into something unique. According to the aforementioned Sims, there are some common features that the best literary nonfiction writers employ. He said:

“Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism, voice, a focus on ordinary people… and accuracy.”

Editor, Mark Kramer echoes these characteristics in his ‘breakable rules’ for literary journalists, which he penned for Harvard University. His rules are as follows.

• Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects’ worlds and in background research.
• Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor with readers and with sources.
• Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.
• Literary journalists write in “intimate voice,” informal, frank, human and ironic.
• Style counts, and tends to be plain and spare.
• Literary journalists write from a disengaged and mobile stance, from which they tell stories and also turn and address readers directly.
• Structure counts, mixing primary narrative with tales and digressions to amplify and reframe events.
• Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers’ sequential reactions.

As said above though, these are all ‘breakable rules’.

The difficulty in defining this type of writing was also touched upon in the 2012 anthology, Global ‘‘Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination’ by Keeble and Tulloch.

They stated: “On a value-free level, we might argue that, rather than a stable genre or family of genres, literary journalism defines a field where different traditions and practices of writing intersect”.

However, when defining literary journalism and literary reportage, Keeble and Tulloch’s definition does work well: “‘The defining mark of literary journalism is the personality of the writer, the individual and intimate voice of a whole, candid person . . . speaking simply in his or her own right”.

Much of the criticism relating to literary journalism relates to its prioritizing style and narrative technique, over reportage.

As Josh Roiland of the University of Maine puts it, “literary journalism has experienced a resurgence in recent years, and like all popular movements it has sustained a backlash from those who believe it fetishizes narrative at the expense of research and reporting.”

Author and academic, D.G. Myers, shared another critique of the genre, calling it out for ‘pretention’.

He wrote: “Apparently, literary journalism is fancy journalism, highbrow journalism. It is journalism plus fine writing. It is journalism with literary pretensions. But here’s the thing about literary pretensions. They are pretentious. They are phoney. Good writers don’t brag about writing literature, which is a title of honor.”

He also points out how the stylistic methods used are a mixture of travel writing and historical record, rather than plain journalism. He added:

“(Literary journalism) is history because it undertakes to determine what happened in a past, travel writing because it depends upon first-hand observation in addition to documented evidence.”

Liz Fakazis wrote for Britannica on the subject of literary journalism and its critics. She wrote: “(Literary journalism) ignited a debate over how much like a novel or short story a journalistic piece could be before it began violating journalism’s commitment to truth and facts.”

Overall, most of these critiques appear to come from a similar point of view.

That is that the personal essay style of writing that embodies literary journalism is too far removed from the values of news reporting in its most puritanical form. For instance, some argue that this type of reporting does not put enough emphasis on objectivity.

Fakazis further discussed this in her Britannica piece, pointing toward the evolution of truth within journalism as a reason and justification for this type of writing . She wrote:

“(Literary journalists) works challenged the ideology of objectivity and its related practices that had come to govern the profession. The (literary journalists) argued that objectivity does not guarantee truth and that so-called “objective” stories can be more misleading than stories told from a clearly presented personal point of view.

“Mainstream news reporters echoed the New Journalists’ arguments as they began doubting the ability of “objective” journalism to arrive at truth—especially after more traditional reporting failed to convey the complex truth of events such as McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.”

The fact that objectivity was removed as a guiding principle of the Society of Professional Journalists (replaced with fairness and accuracy) in 1996 further pushes this argument.

As is discussed in a ThoughtCo article by academic Richard Nordquist , although narrative nonfiction is obliged to report the facts, it is also required to share the bigger picture and this can be even more important. He wrote:

“Literary journalists face a complicated challenge. They must deliver facts and comment on current events in ways that speak to much larger big picture truths about culture, politics, and other major facets of life; literary journalists are, if anything, more tied to authenticity than other journalists. Literary journalism exists for a reason: to start conversations.

Ultimately, literary journalism is a type of reportage that requires time, commitment and deep knowledge of the craft. It’s not something that you’ll read in a tabloid or online often, but it’s rewarding for the writer and readers.

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FAQs About literary journalism

Literary journalism is a genre of journalistic work that consists of writing that embraces narrative techniques while presenting a factual story.

Literary journalism contextualizes a story and presents more than just the plain facts, which at times do not give a rounded view of the going-on being reported on.

The key difference is the writing style. Literary journalism takes on narrative techniques that are more typical of novels, short stories, and other forms of literature. Meanwhile, traditional journalism reports the facts and sticks to formulas, such as the inverted pyramid, which is designed for sharing news efficiently.

Cian Murray is an experienced writer and editor, who graduated from Cardiff University’s esteemed School of Journalism, Media and Culture. His work has been featured in both local and national media, and he has also produced content for multinational brands and agencies.

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Literary Journalism I

Learn the basics of nonfiction writing — which offers rich, detailed, and vivid portraits of real events — as you read the best examples of the genre, and begin your own works.

What you can learn.

• Define what literary journalism is and how it differs from standard reportage
• Read examples from contemporary masters like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese
• Develop skills of strong fiction writing to apply to writing about true events
• Start your own literary journalism project and get input from peers and the instructor

About this course:

Spring 2024 schedule.

Enrollment limited to 15 students; early enrollment advised. Visitors not permitted. Internet access required.

Internet access required to retrieve course materials.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE PUBLIC SYLLABUS FOR THIS COURSE.

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Creative Nonfiction and Literary Journalism: What’s the Difference?

Mar 21, 2017 by Kayla Dean published in Writing

When I was in high school, my AP English teacher had our class read essays from names like Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Back then, I didn’t know who any of these people were. I fell in love with “Death of a Moth” when I had to write a one-page analysis of it back in the day, but it wasn’t until my last year of college that I really understood what these authors were doing: writing creative nonfiction.

Yes, I know. You’ve heard the term already. Everyone on the blogosphere seems to have something to say about it. All the articles you click on now almost always have a storied way of telling you basic information. Writing advice blogs mention the word here or there. And have you seen that Creative Nonfiction magazine at Barnes & Noble (i.e., one of THE DREAM magazines for our genre)?

This is the beginning of another endeavor: I’m going to explain creative nonfiction, its genres, and how you can write your own creative nonfiction essays in this new column.

Don’t try to tell me that you aren’t interesting enough. That you haven’t been to Venice yet, and you don’t think that at twenty-something years old you could possibly have enough life experience to write anything interesting. You don’t feel like enough of a person yet. I am all of the above. Your experiences are enough to figure out this whole writing-about-real-experiences thing. First stop? Let’s break down the difference between creative nonfiction and literary journalism.

What Creative Nonfiction Actually Means

Creative nonfiction was coined by Lee Gutkind in the ‘90s. Simply stated, it’s “true stories, well told.” At least, that’s the slogan for his magazine. Gutkind has written several books on the genre, like this one , which is incredibly helpful for getting started in the genre. But if you’re looking for a more precise definition, creative nonfiction is essentially a narrative that deals in factual events. Meaning that whatever you write about, whether in essays or long-form, must be based in reality.

But there’s also something unique about this genre: it’s extremely important that you tell a narrative that has a literary language about it. In other words, you want your prose to be compulsively readable because it’s real life told in a human voice that strays away from the technical or academic.

Some consider creative nonfiction to be an umbrella term for a genre that includes things like personal essays, memoir, travel writing, and literary journalism. You probably know what the first three are, but why is the last one different from creative nonfiction?

How Literary Journalism Fits In

Some people say there isn’t a difference. But here’s my take: literary journalism is often rooted in heavy research. For example, a biologist could write about the problems they see in an endangered population of turtles in the Pacific. A journalist could write about their experiences reporting in the Middle East, exposing a problem they encountered while in the field. Both of these are real examples. But they aren’t necessarily based on the storyteller’s life so much as the facts that they uncover on their journey. A writer can use figurative language to weave a narrative, but they can’t just engage in solipsism for 300 pages.

Not that creative nonfiction allows this. However, there’s a bit more freedom in the way that a writer can arrange facts. Some writers have even gotten in trouble when readers discovered they hadn’t told the story exactly as it had happened. You don’t want to stir up controversy, but there is a freedom in how you collapse or expand events. You can even re-order them to fit a narrative arc.

How to Pick the Right Non-Fiction Genres

Some writers object to writing this way. You may even find that there are two different camps of writers who completely disagree with one another’s prose. This may seem divisive. But there may be another option.

Literary nonfiction is another term I’ve seen thrown around, but not as often as the first two. It usually operates as a blanket term for both creative nonfiction and literary journalism. This one combines the essence of both into a style that works in many contexts. For a literary nonfiction piece, you’d do a bit more research than for a piece that is creative nonfiction. The latter form does allow you to simply write about your life. You may fact check dates or places, but many writers of creative nonfiction write things as they remember them. Implicit in some writing is even a type of subjectivity because the experiences are so personal that they’re more difficult to really verify.

Maybe this feels a little confusing. But if you’re looking to write about your own life, you’ll likely fall in the creative nonfiction camp. If you want some great essays to read on just about anything, check out online publications like Ecotone, Longreads, Literary Hub, or The Millions. These are great places to start if you want to read some creative nonfiction ASAP. And, if you’re a personal essay person, check out these tips from The New York Times on writing great creative nonfiction.

Those essays you read in high school English class can be a great start for your first foray into creative nonfiction, but they’re just the beginning. The realm of nonfiction may feel intimidating, especially if you’re not sure you have a shocking tale to put into a memoir just yet. That’s the great thing about creative nonfiction: you really can write about just about anything. The best part? No sensationalism required.

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Stories, Students, and Social Justice: Literary Journalism as a Teaching Tool for Change

• First Online: 05 August 2022

Cite this chapter

• Mitzi Lewis 3 &
• Jeffrey C. Neely 4  

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Scholars have long noted the connection between literary journalism and social change. Whitt states that “literary journalism is at root a political and social movement” in which readers and practitioners hold the belief that a transparent personal voice, coupled with thoroughly researched commentary, may be a more trustworthy source of truth-telling than corporate mainstream conceptions of “objectivity.” Moreover, Whitt argues that the teaching of literary journalism can help awaken a social consciousness in students. To explore this phenomenon, we examine literary journalism post-secondary instruction—either as a critical exercise or as praxis—through the lens of Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. We seek to understand opportunities and limitations that literary journalism presents in promoting social justice causes and how the genre may foster students’ understanding of social justice through Mezirow’s four stages of meaning. In this way we strive to add to discussion underpinning other contributions to this volume: if and how literary journalism might help deliver facts of lives of the marginalized, facilitate an empathic engagement with those lives, and create movement toward improving those lives.

• Social justice
• Transformative learning
• Advocacy journalism
• Activist journalism
• Literary journalism
• Social justice education
• Narrative journalism

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Jan Whitt, “Awakening a Social Conscience: The Study of Novels in Journalism Education.” Asia Pacific Media Educator 18 (2007): 88.

Barbara Applebaum, “Is Teaching for Social Justice a Liberal Bias?” Teachers College Record 111, no. 2 (February 2009): 376.

Ruksana Osman, Emmanuel Ojo and David J. Hornsby. “Transforming Higher Education Towards a Socially Just Pedagogy” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 28, no. 4 (May-June 2018): 395.

Lukas H. Meyer and Pranay Sanklecha. “Philosophy of Justice: Extending Liberal Justice in Space and Time,” in Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research , eds. Clara Sabbagh and Manfred Schmidt (New York: Springer, 2016), 29.

Omiunota Nelly Ukpokodu. “Realizing Transformative Learning and Social Justice Education: Unpacking Teacher Education Practice,” in Social Justice and Transformative Learning: Culture and Identity in the United States and South Africa , eds. Saundra M. Tomlinson-Clarke and Darren L. Clarke (New York: Routledge, 2016), 137.

Jack Mezirow. “Transformative Learning Theory,” in Contemporary Theories of Learning , ed. Knud Illeris (New York: Routledge, 2018), 92.

Mezirow, 93.

Mezirow, 94; Donald C. Heilman and Darren L. Clarke. “Transformative Learning Theory: Perspectives on Nelson Mandela and Application for US Learners in South Africa,” in Social Justice and Transformative Learning , eds. S. Saundra M. Tomlinson-Clarke and Darren L. Clarke (New York: Routledge, 2016), 42.

Mezirow, 64.

Michael Blanding, “Where Does Journalism End and Activism End and Activism Begin?” Nieman Reports 73, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 8.

Blanding, 8.

Caroline Fisher, “The Advocacy Continuum: Towards a Theory of Advocacy in Journalism.” Journalism 17, no. 6 (August 2016): 712, 723.

Fisher, 723.

Stephen J.A. Ward. “Journalism Ethics,” in The Handbook of Journalism Studies , eds. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 301–302.

Elizabeth S. Bird and Robert W. Dardenne. “Rethinking News and Myth as Storytelling,” in The Handbook of Journalism Studies , eds. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 214.

Richard L. Kaplan, “The News About New Institutionalism: Journalism’s Ethic of Objectivity and Its Political Origins,” Political Communication 23, no. 2 (2006): 173.

Linda Jean Kenix, “Culture as Constitutive: An Exploration of Audience and Journalist Perceptions of Journalism in Samoa,” Communication, Culture & Critique 8, no. 1 (2015): 38.

Kai Hafez, “Journalism Ethics Revisited: A Comparison of Ethics Codes in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim Asia,” Political Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 225.

Jacob L. Nelson and Dan A. Lewis, “Training Social Justice Journalists: A Case Study,” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 70, no. 4 (2015): 396.

The exact language on the questionnaire was (1) “How comfortable do you feel with literary/long form/narrative journalists assuming an explicit role as activists or advocates for social justice issues in their work?” and (2) “How comfortable do your students feel with literary/long form/narrative journalists assuming an explicit role as activists or advocates for social justice issues in their work?”

The researchers tested for the homogeneity of variance, with results supporting the assumption of homogenous variance (i.e., no statistically significant differences in variance among groups). Additionally, the researchers ran both parametric and non-parametric analysis (chi-squared test) on the ordinal data. Both tests revealed significant differences between instructors who teach literary journalism as practice and those who teach literary journalism as academic study for the questions addressing students’ use of imagination to redefine social issues and their level of comfort with literary journalists serving as advocates. A bivariate correlation (Pearson) test indicated that results for these questions were correlated (p = 0.02).

Rob W. Holland, Bas Verplanken and Ad Van Knippenberg, “On the Nature of Attitude–Behavior Relations: The Strong Guide, the Weak Follow.” European Journal of Social Psychology 32, no. 6 (2002): 869–876.

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Lewis, M., Neely, J.C. (2022). Stories, Students, and Social Justice: Literary Journalism as a Teaching Tool for Change. In: Alexander, R., McDonald, W. (eds) Literary Journalism and Social Justice . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89420-7_19

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Criticism & Features

June 7, 2012

Critical Views on Literary Journalism

By Mark Athitakis

In the US, “literary journalism” means reportage that employs many of the narrative techniques of fiction; the New Yorker has created the model. Elsewhere in the world, the term, if it is used at all, would mean the newspaper columns written by poets and fiction writers. These crónicas or feuilletons —English doesn’t even have a word for it—are free-form combinations of observation, anecdote, and rumination. They are not only a regular source of income (in the absence of creative writing schools) but a way of inserting literary writers into the public discourse. Probably the last US writer of this type was Kenneth Rexroth, whose columns ran in the San Francisco Examiner in the 1960s and are now available online . In Latin America, countless writers have taken advantage of the form (and the job). Collected in English translation, Clarice Lispector’s Crónicas , Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses , and Octavio Paz’s Alternating Current are excellent examples. Among the many European writers, I particularly love Joseph Roth’s dispatches from Paris and Berlin, gathered in two books ( What I Saw and Report from a Parisian Paradise ) translated by Michael Hofmann. One can’t even imagine a NYT op-ed page written by the likes of Lispector and Roth, rather than Maureen Dowd and Ross Douthat.

D.G. Myers, an NBCC member, faculty member at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University, and author of The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 , has some harsh words for the concept of “literary journalism” in the first place. The piece below originally ran at Literary Commentary , a blog Myers maintains at the website of Commentary magazine; we reprint it with his permission. Tomorrow Critical Mass will run a response to Myers' piece from Norman Sims, editor of the anthologies The Literary Journalists, Literary Journalism , and True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism .

Over at Critical Mass (the blog of the National Book Critics Circle), Geoff Dyer reveals the five “works of literary journalism” that he likes best. Dyer won the Circle’s 2011 criticism award for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition , a collection of essays. It’s not his fault that his list of favorites is dull and vapid. The classification of “literary journalism” is dull and vapid.

As a term, literary journalism is first cousin to “literary fiction,” another dull and vapid classification the republic of letters could do without. Apparently, literary journalism is fancy journalism, highbrow journalism. It is journalism plus fine writing. It is journalism with literary pretensions. But here’s the thing about literary pretensions. They are pretentious. They are phony. Good writers don’t brag about writing literature, which is a title of honor. Good writers accept the moral obligation to write well — that is, they subjugate themselves to the demands of the text under hand — and they leave the question of literature, the question of lasting value, up to the literary critics.

The word journalism does not denote a genre, but a venue. Journalism is what gets printed in journals and their digital successors, including blogs and even Twitter. Literary journalism is periodical writing about literature. I am a literary journalist, because I write about books for COMMENTARY. Edmund Wilson is the patron saint of literary journalists. But when he wrote book-length criticism that was not originally conceived as a series of contributions to the journals ( Patriotic Gore , for example), Wilson was no longer writing as a journalist. And when he wrote journal pieces like those collected in The American Earthquake but originally published in the New Republic (about “the arts of the metropolis, from Stravinsky conducting Pétrouchka to Houdini, nightclubs and burlesque shows, Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush , the painting of O’Keeffe and George Bellows,” as his biographer describes them), Wilson was no longer writing as a literary journalist.

Most of what gets referred to as “literary journalism” is some combination of history and travel writing — history because it undertakes to determine what happened in a past, travel writing because it depends upon first-hand observation in addition to documented evidence. Those who object that journalism (of any kind) is not history are doing little beyond disclosing their own prejudices and assumptions. “The question in history,” Michael Oakeshott wrote, “is never what must, or what might have taken place, but solely what the evidence obliges us to conclude did take place.” Thus the historian and the journalist share the same obligation — an obligation to the evidence. What did take place might have taken place five minutes or five centuries ago, but as long as it belongs to the past, historian and journalist share the same interest in it.

Nor do their objectives differ, no matter how far apart their methods and prose might seem to put them. Oakeshott again: “The historian’s business is not to discover, to recapture, or even to interpret; it is to create and to construct.” Both historians and journalists recreate the past in the name of reporting what the evidence obliges them to conclude took place. Historians may claim to be more comprehensive and objective; “literary” journalists, to be more compelling and timely. But these claims are justified merely by the fact that some historians and some journalists have bought into them. They are self-advertisements, not logical distinctions.

There is no reason for anyone to repeat them, nor to compile lists of their favorite “literary journalism.”

What is literary journalism, and why did Sean Penn fail to carry it off?

PhD Student in English, University of Sydney

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On Saturday evening (US time), Rolling Stone published an interview (the first in decades) with Joaquín Guzmán Loera , best known as El Chapo, the world’s most notorious prison escapee and drug kingpin. The publication instigated the now-familiar, solemnly recognised ritual of internet pandemonium. For the most part, this was due to the fact that the article was written by Sean Penn.

In El Chapo Speaks , Penn describes his journey into the literal and allegorical depths of a Mexican jungle, to sit, drink tequila and reveal to El Chapo his (El Chapo’s) presence on American television in the form of the Fusion original special: Chasing El Chapo .

There are obvious moral questions to be asked about the conduct of Penn and Rolling Stone (the most urgent to do with El Chapo being offered editorial control), and they are being asked .

For me, the issue here is the morality of Penn’s style. The narrative hook is the moral exploration of a man who lives in the public imagination as an uncomplicatedly evil super-villain. Unfortunately, the story unravels because its voice does not enable moral insight.

Inner voice versus public facts

Penn begins with a description of the technological precautions he must take to ensure he is not tracked (they are evidently unsuccessful : El Chapo was re-captured in the early hours of January 8 by the Mexican Navy’s Special Forces).

There is an unsettling digression in which he contemplates the danger of his penis being removed by the narcos he is among, and the article ends with a meditation on the American teens who will be overdosing on the drugs disseminated by Mexican cartels.

By rejecting the tenets of traditional journalism – the sort that at least pretends to objectivity – and straight-up offering the perspective of an Oscar-winner, activist and one-time Madonna husband , Penn is operating at some indefinable narrative location between art, entertainment and fact. So what is his responsibility?

In the 1960s and 70s, a troupe of egomaniacal white men (Penn is, at the very least, continuing this proud tradition), including Tom Wolfe , Truman Capote , Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson , popularised a form of journalism that became known as new or literary journalism.

This brought them fame – as it did to the less egomaniacal, more incisive (not male) Joan Didion , probably the best literary journalist – and permanently altered the form. Today, the influence is felt in longform work everywhere, some of the best examples coming from contemporary fiction writers like George Saunders , David Foster Wallace and Tom Bissell .

There is no settled definition of new journalism; the best I’ve encountered is Joseph Hellman’s in Fables of Fact (1981):

Fiction is the literary form most concerned with interior consciousness, while journalism is that most concerned with public fact. New journalism attempts to deal with a world in which the latter has, at an unassimilable pace, entered the former.

Literary journalists are nearly always fiction writers, because fiction writers best capture what it’s like to be inside another person’s head.

Getting out of your head

The genre’s central issue is the handling of authorial voice, through which we enter other minds. In Capote’s tale of a picture-perfect Kansas family’s brutal murder, In Cold Blood (1965), the narrator has a ghostly omniscience, never appearing as a character, but presuming to know the internal workings of his subjects’ heads.

In Mailer’s story of the 1967 anti-Vietnam march on Washington, The Armies of the Night (which carries the absurdly grandiloquent subtitle: History as a Novel, The Novel as History), he describes himself, in the third person, as dramatic protagonist. Despite Mailer’s irrepressible self-esteem, he frequently self-deflates (“Mailer was a snob of the worst sort,” we are told).

Wallace begins his excellent article on David Lynch with self-deprecation:

I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed.

These strategies are each, in their own way, responding to traditional journalism’s failure to capture the journalists’ humanity, the humanity of the reader and the humanity of those written about.

Penn’s intrusive persona

Despite the title, El Chapo Speaks is Penn’s story and, unlike those described above, his perspective does not facilitate access to a world. Instead, the frequency of the first-person pronoun is exhausting (“I see no spying eyes, but I assume they are there.”) and the reader is plunged into a loop of grandiose self-reflection:

I’d offered myself to experiences beyond my control in numerous countries of war, terror, corruption and disaster. Places where what can go wrong will go wrong, had gone wrong, and yet in the end, had delivered me in one piece with a deepening situational awareness (though not a perfect science) of available cautions within the design in chaos.

When Penn meets El Chapo there are fragments of insight. He does not see “the big bad wolf of lore”. Instead, the drug dealer’s presence,

conjures questions of cultural complexity and context, of survivalists and capitalists, farmers and technocrats, clever entrepreneurs of every ilk…

The journalist’s obligation to uncover his subject’s depths is independent of the subject’s virtue, and attempting to humanise El Chapo is a worthy endeavour. But the story must escape the writer’s head and explore the worlds of others.

By its style, the article makes a claim to be in the tradition of literary journalism, aiming to be both journalism and art. Artistically, it fails. On the other hand, worthwhile points are made about the futility of the War on Drugs and America’s complicity in Mexico’s violence, and the story of this particular Hollywood dude drinking tequila with El Chapo is inherently fascinating.

But the lack of humility does Penn in. A literary journalist owes the reader imaginative access to other perspectives, and Penn makes little effort to imagine outside his own. Literary journalism’s ethical privilege is absent.

Didion ends the preface to her first essay collection thus:

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Sean Penn wants you to think the opposite.

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January 1, 1995, breakable rules for literary journalists.

By Mark Kramer

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When writers, readers, English teachers, librarians, bookstore people, editors, and reviewers discuss extended digressive narrative nonfiction these days, they’re fairly likely to call it literary journalism. The previous term in circulation was Tom Wolfe’s contentious “New Journalism.” Coined in the rebellious mid-’60s, it was often uttered with a quizzical tone and has fallen out of use because the genre wasn’t really alternative to some old journalism, and it wasn’t really new.

Literary journalism is a duller term. Its virtue may be its innocuousness. As a practitioner, I find the “literary” part self-congratulating and the “journalism” part masking the form’s inventiveness. But “literary journalism” is roughly accurate. The paired words cancel each other’s vices and describe the sort of nonfiction in which arts of style and narrative construction long associated with fiction help pierce to the quick of what’s happening – the essence of journalism.

This journalism in fact has proper pedigree. Daniel Defoe, writing just after 1700, is the earliest cited by Norman Sims, one of the few historians of the form. The roster also includes Mark Twain in the 19th century and Stephen Crane at the start of the 20th. Before and just after the Second World War, James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, A.J. Leibling, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, and John Steinbeck tried out narrative essay forms. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion followed, and somewhere in there, the genre came into its own – that is, its writers began to identify themselves as part of a movement, and the movement began to take on conventions and to attract writers. Public consciousness of a distinct genre has risen, slowly.

In the 1970s John McPhee, Edward Hoagland, and Richard Rhodes – among others now in their 50s and 60s – broadened the form, joined in the 1980s by several dozen then-youthful counterparts, including Tracy Kidder and Mark Singer. Richard Preston and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, the youth of this collection, began publishing in their 20s, and both had studied literary journalism in seminars – a sure sign a new genre has arrived. Another sign is a change in its treatment by book review editors. They used to assign area experts routinely – geologists to review McPhee’s “Basin and Range” (1981), computer programmers to review Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” – with neither brand of scientist generically qualified to assay the subtle narrative techniques and deft wordsmithing. Now editors are likelier to assign such reviewing to other writers and to critics.

New forms of the written word that catch on are infrequent literary occurrences. Still, writers will forever seek ways beyond the constraints by overlapping cousin-genres – travel travel writing, memoir, ethnographic and historical essays, some fiction and even ambiguous semifiction stemming from real events – all tempt fields just beyond rickety fences.

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Using narrative digression to weave backstory, context and suspense into stories

In good writing, clarity is job one

Literary journalism has been growing up, and readers by the million seek it out. But it has been a you-know-it-when-you-see-it form. The following annotated list of defining traits derives from the work in this anthology and works by other authors I’ve cited. It reflects authors’ common practices, as the “rules” of harmony taught in composition classes mirror composers’ habits. But however accurately represented, rules for making art will surely be stretched and reinvented again and again.

1. Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects’ worlds and in background research.

Speaking at a relaxed meeting of the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University, shortly after he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Soul of a New Machine,” Tracy Kidder enraged several young journalists with an offhand comment – that literary journalists are, overall, more accurate than daily journalists. He recalls telling them, “It has to be true; our reporting takes months, and you’re sent to get a story and write it up in three hours, and do two more before leaving work. A privileged journalist might get a few weeks for a feature.”

Literary journalists hang out with their sources for months and even years. It’s a reward – and risk – of the trade, as I’ve discovered on many projects. I spent one glorious June with a baseball team; I wandered intermittently in backwoods Russia through six years of perestroika and the ensuing confused transition. I spent a year in hospital operating rooms, and years in the fields and corporate offices of America’s farms. Every writer in this anthology has had similar experiences. The reporting part of the work is engrossing and tedious. It is not social time. One stays alert for meaningful twists of narrative and character, all the while thinking about how to portray them and about how to sustain one’s welcome.

The point of literary journalists’ long immersions is to comprehend subjects at a level Henry James termed “felt life” – the frank, unidealized level that includes individual difference, frailty, tenderness, nastiness, vanity, generosity, pomposity, humility, all in proper proportion. It shoulders right on past official or bureaucratic explanations for things. It leaves quirks and self-deceptions, hypocrisies and graces intact and exposed; in fact, it uses them to deepen understanding.

This is the level at which we think about our own everyday lives, when we’re not fooling ourselves. It’s surely a hard level to achieve with other people. It takes trust, tact, firmness, and endurance on the parts of both writer and subject. It most often also takes weeks or months, including time spent reading up on related economics, psychology, politics, history, and science. Literary journalists take elaborate notes retaining wording of quotes, sequence of events, details that show personality, atmosphere, and sensory and emotional content. We have more time than daily journalists are granted, time to second-guess and rethink first reactions. Even so, making sense of what’s happening – writing with humanity, poise, and relevance – is a beguiling, approachable, unreachable goal.

2. Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor with readers and with sources.

No Un-Literary-Journalistic-Activities Committee subpoenas the craft’s corner-cutters. Literary journalists, unlike newspaper reporters, are solo operatives. You can see the writers here, in their first few paragraphs, establishing their veracity with readers by displays of forthrightness and street savvy. These are important moments. They imply the rules the author elects to follow. Readers are the ultimate judges of which authors don’t play fairly. They have had the last word in several publicized cases. Two areas of ethical concern often jumble together in discussions of the scrupulousness of literary journalism: (a) the writer’s relationship to readers and (b) the writer’s relationship to sources.

(a) The writer’s relationship to readers

A few distinguished essayists we retrospectively link to literary journalism did indeed commit acts that, if done by writers today, would be considered downright sinful: They combined or improved upon scenes, aggregated characters, refurbished quotations, and otherwise altered what they knew to be the nature of their material.

What distinguished them from fiction writer may have been merely intention – presumably to convey to readers the “sense” of an actuality. In fact, one of the genre’s grand old men, Joseph Mitchell, whose work is in this collection, has written about and spoken to interviewers about using composite characters and scenes in his 1948 classic “Old Mr. Flood.” John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima,” did the same thing with the main character of his 1944 article “Joe Is Home Now” (however, he later complained about the practice among New Journalists). Mitchell never complained, and neither writer did it again.

I have no trouble comprehending the liberty of either of these artists trying things out. Other pioneers, including George Orwell (in “Shooting an Elephant”) and Truman Capote (in “In Cold Blood” (1966)), apparently also recast some events, and my private verdict is to find them similarly exculpated by virtue of the earliness (and elegance) of their experimentation, and by the presumed lack of intention to deceive. None violated readers’ expectations for the genre, because there weren’t yet strong expectations – or much of a genre, for that matter – to violate.

Still, if you reread those essays having learned they portray constructed events, you may find yourself second-guessing what was real. One wouldn’t bother doing this with a novel. The ambiguity is distracting. Today, literary journalism is a genre readers recognize and read expecting civil treatment. The power of the prose depends on the readers’ accepting the ground rules the works implicitly proclaim.

There is a category of expectations, and I’d argue it describes material that falls outside the modern understanding of what literary journalism is. By the time he published “The Executioner’s Song,” in 1979, about a triple murderer named Gary Gilmore, Norman Mailer elected to specify his liberation from restrictive factuality. The dust jacket bore the odd description “A True Life Novel.” Although such truth-in-labeling doesn’t explicitly demarcate what parts are actual, it’s a good-faith proclamation to readers that they’ve entered a zone in which a nonfiction writer’s covenant with readers may be a tease, a device, but doesn’t quite apply. It would take a naive audience to misconstrue clearly self-proclaiming “docudramas” such as Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” (which Mark Singer writes about in this collection) or Mailer’s sort of “docufiction.” Most reader swill instead savor, whether as art or entertainment, the deliberate byplay of reality against fancy, in this often wholesome, but always special category of film and prose that straddles the line.

However, chats with writer friends and panel discussions at writing conferences have me convinced that literary journalists have come to share a stodgier tacit understanding with readers, one so strong that it amounts to a contract: that the writers do what they appear to do, which is to get reality as straight as they can manage, and not make it up. Some, of course, admit in private to moments of temptation, moments when they’ve realized that tweaking reality could sharpen the meaning or flow of a scene. If any writers have gone ahead and actually tweaked, however, they’re no longer chatting about it to friends, nor talking about it on panels. In recent years, a few literary journalists have drawn heavy fire for breaking trust with readers. It is not a subject about which readers are neutral.

Conventions literary journalists nowadays talk about following to keep things square with readers include: no composite scenes, no misstated chronology, no falsification of the discernible drift or proportion of events, no invention of quotes, no attribution of thoughts to sources unless the sources have said they’d had those very thoughts, and no unacknowledged deals with subjects involving payment or editorial control. Writers do occasionally pledge away use of actual names and identifying details in return for ongoing frank access, and notify readers they’ve done so. These conventions all add up to keeping faith. The genre makes less sense otherwise. Sticking to these conventions turns out to be straightforward.

Writers discover how to adhere to them and still structure essays creatively. There’s no reason a writer can’t place a Tuesday scene prior to a Monday scene, if the writer thinks readers should know how a situation turned out before knowing how it developed. It is easy to keep readers unconfused and undeceived, just by letting them know that you’re doing. While narrating a scene, a literary journalist may wish to quote comments made elsewhere, or embed secondary scenes or personal memories; it is possible to do all these things faithfully, without blurring or misrepresenting what happened where and when, simply by explaining as you go along. Like other literary journalists, I’ve found that, in fact, annoying, inconsistent details that threaten to wreck a scene I’m writing are often signals that my working theories about events need more work, and don’t quite explain what happened yet.

Not tweaking deepens understanding. And getting a slice of life down authentically takes flexibility and hard labor. Readers appreciate writing that does the job. It is not accidental that the rise of literary journalism has been accompanied by authors’ nearly universal adherence to these conventions, which produce trustworthy, in-the-know texts and reliable company for readers.

(b) The writer’s relationships to sources The writer’s reliable companionship with sources can cause difficulty. An inescapable ethical problem arises from a writer’s necessarily intense ongoing relationships with subjects. Gaining satisfactory continuing access is always a tough problem; most potential subjects are doing quite well at life with no writers anywhere in the neighborhood, and their lives are tangles of organizational and personal affiliations. Yet, in order to write authentically at the level of “felt life,” literary journalists will seek from subjects the sustained candor usually accorded only spouses, business partners, and dearest friends. Strong social and legal strictures bind husbands, wives, partners, and pals to only the most tactful public disclosure of private knowledge. Literary journalists’ own honorable purposes, on the other hand, require as much public discourse as possible.

During the months a writer stays around subjects, even a forthright relationship (that has commenced with full discussion of intentions, signing of releases, and display of part articles and books) is likely to develop into something that feels to both parties a lot like a partnership or friendship, if not quite like marriage. The ticklish questions the writer comes up against are these: Does the subject see himself revealing information to a friend, at the same moment the writer sees himself hearing information from a source? And how responsible is the writer for the consequences of such perceptions?

Writers, in good faith, try all sorts of ways to get and keep good access without falsifying their intentions. The most obvious has been to write about people who either don’t mind or else actually like the prospect of being written about. Anthropologists say “access downward” is easier than “access upward.” Literary journalists (including me) have had cordial continuing access to people far from the world of books, who just like the company of the writer and the sound of the project – including hoboes riding the rails, migrant workers sneaking across the border, merchant seamen, teen prostitutes, high school football players, plain dirt farmers.

Another category, exemplary subjects – a dynamic schoolteacher, a deft surgeon, a crew of tip-top carpenters, a dexterous canoemaker, a hard-bargaining corporate farm executive – also welcome attention, sometimes because they have causes they hope to represent, such as bigger school budgets, lessened malpractice liability, or fairer crop subsidies.

My own rule has been to show part articles, to make clear the public exposure involved, to explain my publisher’s and my commitments of time and money, to stipulate that subjects won’t get to edit manuscript or check quotes. Then I go ahead – if I’m still welcome after all that, and sometimes I’m not. In a few cases, I have doubted that subjects understood my intentions or their consequences well enough to consent, or I’ve felt consent hadn’t been freely given but was influenced by boss’s orders (for example, the nurses in an operating room where my subject worked). Then, I’ve made it my business to do no harm. By luck, I’ve been able to write what I wished, without having these occasional moments alter essential content. Every genre, whether daily or literary journalism, poetry, or fiction, ultimately depends on the integrity of the writer.

3. Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.

The ecology of convenient access impels literary journalists toward routine events, not extraordinary ones. The need to gain long-term, frank access has forced writers to seek material in places that can be visited, and to avoid, in spite of longings to the contrary, places that can’t. The level of access required is so high that it has largely determined the direction of literary journalists’ efforts.

The goal during “reporting” or “fieldwork” is not to become socialized as an insider, as an intern at a firm might en route to a job. It is to know what insiders think about, to comprehend subjects’ experiences and perspectives and understand what is routine to them. Insiders who eventually read a literary journalist’ account should find it accurate and relevant, but not from an inside perspective. At first, when I spent time with surgeons, blood alarmed me – an unsurgeonlike attitude. By the end of a year witnessing controlled mayhem, my attention had shifted. I knew when the surgeon found bleeding routine, and recognized the rare moments when it alarmed him. My rookie reaction wasn’t relevant to the surgeon’s world; my later reaction served me better in comprehending his perspective.

Routine doesn’t mean humdrum. Most anyone’s life, discovered in depth and from a compassionate perspective, is interesting. Some very routine subjects, however, haven’t been breached, and seem unbreachable except by insiders. Oddly, one major constraint is legal. Commission from a national magazine in hand, I once approached an attorney well known for effectively defending many suspected murderers. He was tempted by the prospect of an article about his daily work. I sketched out the access I’d need – including entrée to his office discussions with and about a current client. The attorney backed away. I’d be out beyond the umbrella of attorney-client privilege, he said, and could be challenged, and perhaps subpoenaed, for questioning on what I’d heard. His client could then sue him for malpractice.

Uncontaminated access to top levels of big business during a major deal has also proved nearly beyond reach, mostly because corporate sources perceive that allowing a journalist to roam might exceed prudent fiduciary responsibility, and might subject them to suit. Also, businesspeople work repeatedly within a circle of associates, and whoever let in a writer unbound by the circle’s prospect of mutual advantage could be seen as breaking trust. Writers occasionally do make it through these barriers. A few kiss-and-tell versions of business deals have also been written by former players. And writerly post-factum reconstructions sometimes re-create dramas of complex deals.

A cousin, true-crime reporting, also reconstructs events post-factum . Murderers usually try not to do their work in front of writers. But criminal cases subsequently open access to the most secret places, starting the moment the deed is revealed. Cooperative culprits looking for redemption, variety, or forgiveness; vengeful family members; and elaborate court records have taken writers far into hidden inner worlds – after the fact.

Nonfiction writers are fated to arrive late. Something that a literary journalist can only do in the first person, with hindsight, after chance has subjected him to bad or good fortune, is to write about a person about to be mugged, slip on a banana peel, or find a pot of gold. Once in a while, something untoward happens to a writer, and readers may profit from the author’s misfortune – Francis Steegmuller’s “The Incident at Naples” (which ran in The New Yorker in 1986) comes to mind. Steegmuller describes being robbed and injured while on holiday. Perhaps it is to push this limit that writers go adventuring – sailing into nasty seas and living to tell, hunting in the green hills of Africa and bagging the limit in close calls. Before disaster destroyed the lives of Christa MacAuliff and the Challenger astronauts, NASA had signed up writers wishing to go space traveling. Among the applicants was Tracy Kidder, who has gone on instead to write about aging.

4. Literary journalists write in “intimate voice,” informal, frank, human and ironic.

In literary journalism, the narrator is neither the impersonal, dutiful explainer and qualifier of academic writing, who presents research material carefully but without special consideration of readers, nor the seemingly objective and factual, judgment-suspending, orthodox informant of newswriting. The narrator of literary journalism has a personality, is a whole person, intimate, frank, ironic, wry, puzzled, judgmental, even self-mocking – qualities academics and daily news reporters dutifully avoid as unprofessional and unobjective. They’re taught to discount their personal reactions about other people and to advance no private opinions. From the perspective of the institutions or intellectual traditions sponsoring such prose, there are sound civic, commercial, scientific, and discipline-abetting reasons for curtailing the appearance of private judgment. The effect of both academic and news styles is to present readers with what appear to be the facts , delivered in unemotional, nonindividuated, conventionalized, and therefore presumably fair and neutral voice. Obviously, they leave lots out.

The defining mark of literary journalism is the personality of the writer, the individual and intimate voice of a whole, candid person not representing, defending, or speaking on behalf of any institution, not a newspaper, corporation, government, ideology, field of study, chamber of commerce, or travel destination. It is the voice of someone naked, without bureaucratic shelter, speaking simply in his or her own right, someone who has illuminated experience with private reflection, but who has not transcended crankiness, wryness, doubtfulness, and who doesn’t blank out emotional realities of sadness, glee, excitement, fury, love. The genre’s power is the strength of this voice. It is an unaffiliated social force—although its practice has been mostly benign. It is a one of the few places in media where mass audiences may consume unmoderated individual assertion, spoken on behalf of no one but the adventurous author.

The voice is rarely no-holds-barred, accusatory, or confessional, however, even though some writers – Tom Wolfe comes to mind – are adept at making it look that way. In most literary journalism, an informal, competent, reflective voice emerges, a voice speaking with knowledgeable assurance about topics, issues, personal subjects, a voice that reflects – often only indirectly, as subtext – the writer’s self-knowledge, self-respect, and conscience. I suggest to my Boston University writing workshop that members find their voices by imagining they’re telling fairly close friends whose wit they respect about an incident they’d observed and taken seriously, linked to fields they’d studied. What emerges is a sociable, humorously self-aware, but authoritative voice – I hear it at dinner parties when people tell anecdotes. Reading it feels companionable.

This voice is a handy invention for essay writers, not a quirky preference, nor merely a way of getting into the act. It is an effective tool for a difficult modern job. It enables an author to step around acculturated views of relationships and issues that are usually guarded by walls of formal language and invisible institutional alliances. The powers of the candid, intimate voice are many, and they bother people who insist on idealized versions of reality. Formality of language protects pieties, faiths, taboos, appearances, official truths. The intimate voice sidesteps such prohibitions, says things in the mode that professionals in the know use when they leave work feeling pensive and confide to friends or lovers. It is the voice in which we disclose how people and institutions really are. It is a key characteristic of literary journalism, and is indeed something new to journalism.

A former newspaper reporter told me she’d interviewed a city traffic department official and found him stentorian and self-promoting, not sharp on issues, but a charming good-old-boy at local politics. She liked him, but she had his number. Nevertheless, her newspaper article, she recalled, had started something like, “The long-awaited design plans for a new highway exit were released today by the Office of Traffic Management.” Her observations about the man, the jokes her knowing colleagues made about him in the bar near the newsroom afterwards are sorts of material a literary journalist might bring into a narrative about, say, the complex actuality of planning and building a highway exit – along with, perhaps, material on traffic management, bureaucratic structures, urban finance, executive psychology, the politics of urban renewal, and on the meanings of driving and self-promotion and good-old-boyhood in the writer’s own life.

The audience is invited, when reading literary journalism, to adopt complex and relaxed expectations about meaning, and to share something excluded from academic and news articles – the author’s ironic vision. Irony – the device of leading readers to consider a scene in more knowing terms than some of its actors do – is virtually taboo in other forms of nonfiction. Two exceptions come to mind, and in both places, literary journalism turns up. The Wall Street Journal is the one major American paper that regularly runs ironic features on its front page. This may be because management there defines its audience as well-heeled, powerful, and in-the-know – in short, as “not everyone,” but an elite sector of the whole community, those on top, sharing some views of the world below. And Sunday newspaper magazines often feature a wholesome type of ironic voice, in articles whose narrators relate personal experiences with some sensitive aspect of communal morality – prejudice, costly sickness, the burdens of aging and of mental illness. Walt Harrington’s piece, essentially on the growth of interracial tolerance, both his own and our nation’s, is in that spirit. As the piece illustrates, the power of irony need not emerge from sarcasm or meanness. It can bind a community, simply by expanding contexts of events beyond what the actors usually consider.

5. Style counts, and tends to be plain and spare. A mark of literary journalism that shows right from the start of a piece is efficient, individual, informal language. The writers here have worked their language until it is spare, stylish, and controlled. Ear may be the last teachable skill of writing. Elegant, simple expression is the goal, and what many poets and novelists reach toward, too. People discern character in part by divining who’d make those word choices. Impersonal or obdurate speakers get found out. Clean, lucid, personal language draws readers toward experiencing the immediacy of scenes, and the force of ideas.

“If you want to see the invisible world, look at the visible one,” Howard Nemerov said in his enchanted essay “On Metaphor.” The best language of literary journalists is also evocative, playful, sharpened by active verbs, sparing of abstract verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and the many indolent forms of “to be,” taut in its grammatical linkages. Such uncluttered style is gracious – clear and pleasant in its own right, and suited for leading readers not merely to picture, but to feel events. Readers resist clumsy writing, often without thinking much about what’s wrong, but engage with good prose, often as heedlessly. Feeling transports readers as mere logic cannot.

6. Literary journalists write from a disengaged and mobile stance, from which they tell stories and also turn and address readers directly. David Quammen, like the other authors here, occupies a strategic stance in relation to his material in “Strawberries Under Ice.” He is the host. He entertains by telling you a good winter camping tale, immersing you in it so you feel the immediacy of it, its past, its impending future, and the ongoing “now” of it. He also guides you, his presumptive social intimate, through his evaluation of it, exiting from story to informative digressions about glaciers and his psychology, then reentering action.

Readers experience this well-spoken, worldly, witty, cagey storytelling buddy warmly, in good measure because Quammen the writer isn’t trapped within the events he portrays. He describes events (that happened to Quammen the subject) from a “retrospective platform,” recollecting action and considering its shape, meanings, and metaphoric echoes.

This mobile stance of the writer is another key element in literary journalism. Each author in this anthology, while telling tales, repeatedly looks directly at the reader, comments, digresses, brings in associative material, background, previous events – not necessarily personal ones – then reengages the story. When the author drops you back at the spot where the tale’s been left off, the place feels familiar. “Oh, good,” says the well-hosted reader, realizing the story is back on screen, “now I find out what happens next.” The reader rejoins with enhanced perspective on the events, gained from the digressive material. The forward-moving leading edge of the narrative, from which such digressions and returns happen, may be called “the moving now” – it’s a term useful for discerning essay structure. Good storytellers often digress at moments when especially interesting action is pending, and not at the completion of action. Lucid storytelling, skillful selection of moments for pertinent digression, returning to the “moving now,” are among the essential elements out of which literary journalists constructs essays.

The literary journalist’s mobile stance is not quite borrowed property of novelists – in fiction, the reader can never be sure the author has stepped away from the story, and can’t quite shake the presumption that even an author’s most out-of-story asides might turn out to be another layer of story. When the literary journalist digresses and then returns to narrative, the author’s real-world knowledge juxtaposes with story. This mobile stance is an amazing device, full of power.

The authors in this anthology have varied approaches to this mobile stance. Jane Kramer mostly tells about scenes, conversing with readers, but a several refined moments fully sets scenes, drawing readers into experiencing them. Her erudition and grasp of the larger meanings of her subject infuse these moments. We see her scenes with a pleasant knowingness; we are newly sophisticated by her erudition. Tracy Kidder, on the other hand, does almost nothing but tell tales, suspending action for digressive comments to readers only occasionally. Both authors’ stances aid their control of the reader’s developing experience.

7. Structure counts, mixing primary narrative with tales and digressions to amplify and reframe events. Most literary journalism is primarily narrative, telling stories, building scenes. Each piece here carries readers along one, and often a second and third, story line. Walt Harrington’s “A Family Portrait in Black & White” achronologically braids several discrete narratives that explore his relationship to racism, starting nearly currently and flashing back. He relates the events of his own interracial courtship and marriage, and also plaits in the stories of several of his wife’s relatives, and the story of the relaxing of American racial attitudes.

The sequences of scenes and digressions – some brushed past, some dwelled upon – along with the narrator’s mobile stance relative to these tales and asides, comprise narrative structure. Literary journalists have developed a genre that permits them to sculpt stories and digression as complexly as novelists do. At any moment the reader will probably be located somewhere along the time line of at least one unfolding tale and a few developing ideas. Quammen’s “Strawberries Under Ice,” at first glance an example of unusually charming science writing on glaciers, is in fact a coyly constructed narrative of the purgation of his soul, and once that’s well along, of his courtship and marriage, of the miracle of love and its metaphorical expression in the warming effect of ice, of paradoxical and intimate metaphors, finally of rebirth from the warmth of a snow cave. Because of Quammen’s crafty structuring of these elements, the piece creeps up on you. When authors make decisions about structure – order of scenes, points of digression, how intensively to develop which elements of stories and digressions – they consider the effects of the order and intensities chosen on readers’ experience.

8. Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers’ sequential reactions. Readers are likely to care about how a situation came about and what happens next when they are experiencing it with the characters. Successful literary journalists never forget to be entertaining. The graver the writer’s intentions, and the more earnest and crucial the message or analysis behind the story, the more readers ought to be kept engaged. Style and structure knit story and idea alluringly.

If the author does all this storytelling and digressing and industrious structure-building adroitly, readers come to feel they are heading somewhere with purpose, that the job of reading has a worthy destination. The sorts of somewheres that literary journalists reach tend to marry eternal meanings and everyday scenes. Richard Preston’s “The Mountains of Pi,” for instance, links the awkward daily lives of two shy Russian emigre mathematicians to their obscure intergalactic search for hints of underlying order in a chaotic universe.

Readers take journeys designed by authors to tease out the ineluctable within the everyday; the trip will go nowhere without their imaginative participation. Ultimately, what an author creates aren’t sequential well-groomed paragraphs on paper, but sequential emotional, intellectual, and even moral experiences that readers undertake. These are engaging, patterned experiences, akin to the sensations of filmgoing, not textbook reading. What these pieces mean isn’t on paper at all.

The writer paints sensory scenes, confides on a level of intimacy that stirs readers’ own experiences and sensations, and sets up alchemical interplay between constructed text and readers’ psyches. The readers’ realizations are what the author and readers have made together.

Why has this union of detailed fact, narratives, and intimate voice risen so remarkably in this century?

Many traditions that defined behaviors and beliefs at the start of the century have fragmented or vaporized. In 1900 a few hundred categories described the routines of labor, and a handful of patterns defined propriety. These days, there are 10,000 sorts of jobs and of propriety. In the same period, science, which had promised answers, order, and ease, has yielded convolution, danger, and vast domains of knowledge that seem crucial to everyone but comprehensible only by specialists. And in a culture that once called upon experts, and leaders with creeds, for piloting, august authority has run aground. Presidents, priests, generals on horseback, professors in ivory towers – none can command collective faith these days.

Yet somehow this has not resulted in universal despair. A formidable crowd of citizens wants, I’m sure with more urgency than ever, to read books and essays that comprehend what’s happening in its complexity. They demand not just information, but visions of how things fit together now that the center cannot hold. A public that rarely encountered the personal imaginations of others at the turn of the century, now devours topical bestsellers, films and TV shows that cast issues narratively, and literary journalism.

Literary journalism helps sort out the new complexity. If it is not an antidote to bewilderment, at least it unites daily experiences – including emotional ones – with the wild plentitude of information that can be applied to experience. Literary journalism couples cold fact and personal event, in the author’s humane company. And that broadens readers’ scans, allows them to behold others’ lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own. The process moves readers, and writers, toward realization, compassion, and in the best of cases, wisdom.

I’ll even claim that there is something intrinsically political – and strongly democratic – about literary journalism, something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite. That seems inherent in the common practices of the form. Informal style cuts through the obfuscating generalities of creeds, countries, companies, bureaucracies, and experts. And narratives of the felt lives of everyday people test idealizations against actualities. Truth is in the details of real lives.

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Journalism as a Front of War: On American Media and the Ideology of the Status Quo

Introducing a new column by steven w. thrasher.

This begins a series of essays thinking about journalism as a front of war.

In terms of literary craft, tone, and meaning, journalism can be many things. In this series, we will explore the many ways journalism (including reporting practices produced via social media, but also in contrast to some forms of social media) is employed to different ends around the globe. This will include exploring journalism as a praxis of liberation, and how its techniques can even be practiced in such a way that journalism can work as an act of love.

But in the west, we will primarily consider how journalism is, first and foremost, a literary act of war—because everything in the west has been forged in, and is maintained, by war. The United Kingdom was created, and in many ways is upheld despite its decline, through extractive colonialism. This is also true of several of the countries in Europe (which are also not coincidentally among the few nations of the earth opposing a ceasefire in Gaza). Meanwhile, the United States was birthed in—and, if you ask many Native Americans, still defined by— settler colonialism.

As they help to uphold their societies’ hegemony over other nations, the news media of the west reflects these origins and ongoing realities.

And whether it is covering bombs and battlefields abroad or reporting on school districts, city council meetings, police, or gender domestically, journalism in the United States is especially steeped in warfront framing—because public discourse, culture, and language in America are literally referred to as wars.

Lyndon Johnson brought us the War on Crime and the War on Poverty. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon brought us the War on Drugs. (In addition to doing so in Vietnam and Cambodia, Nixon also declared a War on Cancer , which is referred to as such in federal policy to this day, even though war causes cancer.)

More recently, New York Governor Kathy Hohcul and the New York Post have declared a War on Shoplifting . With COVID-19, Donald Trump and Joe Biden both declared a War on the Virus. New York Times columnist Pamala Paul serves as a reliable foot soldier in the War of the Sexes and the Gender Wars. In news media and academia, we constantly hear about a War of Ideas. And conservative Christians, aided by Fox News, constantly whine about a War on Christmas (even though, from Halloween to New Year’s, you can’t escape yuletide carols in almost any public space in America).

And then, there’s perhaps the most circulatory battle phrase of them all, conjured up together by George W. Bush, the turn-of-the-century news media, and the security state: the War on Terror. If it were a person, this war would now be 22—old enough to have served a few tours in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter battle site having been largely put in motion by New York Times journalist Judith Miller ).

Declaring “war on” something in American vernacular to address any social issue is not surprising, given how the ubiquity of the language of war infiltrates our everyday speech and thinking: people campaign in battleground states, engage in protest marches , experience viral outbreaks , talk to those on the ground , say things we regret in the heat of battle , wear makeup to camouflage our wrinkles, have LGBTQ or racial justice allies , reward someone for being a pioneer in their field, deliver bullet points in meetings, and are terminated when we lose our jobs.

And this infiltration not only extends to, but is largely led by, mainstream journalism.

We will begin our exploration by considering one example of how established journalism organizations favor warriors instead of those who question war in the mainstream press, starting by comparing the news production, and backgrounds, of two Jewish American women journalists in the United States. Both alumni of Stanford University: Emily Wilder, formerly (and briefly) of the Associated Press, and Carrie Keller-Lynn, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

On January 29, Keller-Lynn co-authored a Journal article headlined “Intelligence Reveals Details of U.N. Agency Staff’s Links to Oct.7 Attack,” which argued—relying upon “intelligence reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal ”—that “Around 10% of Palestinian aid agency’s 12,000 staff in Gaza have links to militants.” (Reading the article, the actual number of people accused of having participated in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is 12 or 13, or 0.017%.)

This news was leaked right after the International Court of Justice had provisionally ruled in South Africa’s favor that claims of genocide were “plausible” and Israel was ordered “in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza,” to “take all measures within its power to prevent” genocide,” including “ killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (i.e., depriving them of food, water or medicine).

Al Jazeera reports Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians since the court issued its ruling, and counting. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has served as Israel’s partner in discrediting the United Nations Relief Works Administration, the main organ for getting aid into Gaza, and an organization Israel has wanted to take down for decades.

No journalist is “objective”—this will be a theme we will explore in greater depth in further essays—but Keller-Lynn was especially subjective in a particular way. Users of social media quickly pointed out , Keller-Lynn appeared to have served in the Israeli military.

As the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill wrote , “ITrek, an organization that sends grad students on trips to Israel, took down an article featuring an old [2020] interview with Carrie Keller-Lynn, author of the WSJ story promoting Israel’s allegations against UNRWA.”

The ITrek article is fascinating, which you can find archived here or here . In it, Keller-Lynn describes herself as a “Freelance Strategy Consultant,” says she served in the Israeli military in 2009 (where she was “a military liaison to Egypt during the Arab Spring”) and went on her Itrek in 2016. She also talked about co-producing a podcast with her friend, Aliza Landes, called “Israel from Right to Left,” which Keller-Lynn describes as about “Baseline Israeli civics.”

“Hopefully policymakers and journalists will also be our audience” she said, which focused on “explaining fundamental things like how the Knesset is formed.” (The podcast’s webpage, www.israelrightleft.com , is inactive, nor is the podcast archived anywhere I could find.) Keller-Lynn claimed that her friend Alizia Landes, who is interviewed in the same ITrek article, had “literally created social media for the IDF” and was featured in a book called War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century . (I bought the book and there is a lot about Landes. Author David Patrikarakos credits her with being a member of the Israeli military’s “PR team for North American reporters” during Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and with making the Israeli military’s public affairs social media unit what it had become—“and she was three things that characterize it today: young, female and adept with social media.”)

This was with whom Keller-Lynn made her podcast. But back during graduate school at Stanford, Keller-Lynn said that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement was very present. I was in law school there first, and helping lead the on-campus fight against some active BDS resolutions.”

After later being a soldier for Israel and a “freelance strategy consultant” who co-produced a propaganda podcast with a member of the IOF’s social media team, Keller-Lynn later was published by the Wall Street Journal , covering Israel. Then, she obtained an intelligence dossier from Israel—and published damaging information about Israel’s avowed enemy the week the ICJ ordered it to pull back.

A few days later, Channel 4 in Britain got the dossier and said it contained “no evidence” to support Israel’s “explosive new claim” that “around 190 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist operatives” had worked as UNRWA employees and “more than 10 staffers took part in the events of 7th of October.” But by then the damage was done: UNRWA had lost hundreds of millions of funding. There is no telling when, or if, it will come back.

How was anything reported by Keller-Lynn ever “objective” news journalism?

Compare this to the case of Emily Wilder, who is also a Jewish alumni of Stanford. On May 3rd, 2021, Wilder was hired by the Associated Press to cover state politics in Arizona. On May 16, the Israeli military destroyed the building housing the Associated Press’s Gaza bureau in an airstrike. On May 18, the Stanford College Republicans began a smear campaign against Wilder, circulating posts she had made in college and claiming that “While at Stanford from 2016 to 2020, Wilder was a leader in Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization with ties to Hamas affiliates, and which is notorious for inflicting acts of intimidation and violence against pro-Israel students.”

In subsequent days, conservative news outlets and Senator Tom Cotton piled on Wilder—and by May 20, she was fired. (Wilder told SF Gate that the AP “told me that I violated their social media policy and would be terminated immediately, but they never said which tweet or post violated the policy.”)

Why is Keller-Lynn allowed to have served in the Israeli military and bragged about being a propagandist for it prior to covering the Israeli military in one of America’s leading news organizations, but Wilder was not allowed to cover Arizona politics at another major outlet, just because she had criticized a foreign government some 7,447 miles away from Phoenix?

Or, considering them both as former students of the same university, we could ask a question with an even more direct comparison: Why did working as an activist for the BDS movement (in a group called Jewish Voices for Peace ) end one student’s future journalism career—but having worked as an activist against that same movement, and then as a soldier, did not end another’s?

The answer can be found, in part, in the unique role Israel plays as a de facto branch of the United States military (and thus how it is perpetually adjacent to the power of America’s elite institutions). But the specificity of this example should not elide the broad ways journalism in the United States valorizes American militarism (and that of its allies), loathes activism (especially pacifism), and rewards those who lead careers which generally uphold the status quo.

It speaks to how western journalism is not objective about war. Most mainstream journalism subjectively picks sides in wars (or picks war over peace) and actively promotes specific outcomes. Outlets are operationalized to achieve military goals. Most of the time, journalism’s narrative framing props up what bell hooks called “white supremacist, capitalist, [cis-hetero] patriarchy.” Or, as journalist Ramona Martinez put it, “Objectivity is the ideology of the status quo,” as she told Lewis Raven Wallace in his book The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity . 

As readers, scholars, and practitioners of journalism, we are experiencing news media in a time of great flux. Let us unpack how often journalism is utilized as a tool of war, so that we may begin to undo the damage of this and begin—in our minds and in our craft—to dispatch journalism to better ends.

Steven W. Thrasher

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• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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