By taking the fiction-to-journalism relationship as exemplary, we have explored one version of how the fiction-nonfiction split came to be. Now we can draw on those histories of objectivity in fiction and journalism to account for readers' and critics' sometimes vehement responses to practices that seem to blur the boundaries between these exemplary modes of literary and nonliterary discourse. Because I do not separate these categories, other than to acknowledge that literature is what we have decided to regard as such and, following Edmund Wilson, to define journalism as writing for periodicals (Letters 353), we are not faced with the problems of quantitative assessment and arbitrariness that plague definitions based on finding particular properties.