This is a book about both journalism and fiction, specifically about the relationship between the two narrative modes over the course of the twentieth century. By “journalism” I mean writing that appears in periodicals; I also include book-length nonfiction which tells of recent events but which may not have appeared first in a magazine. (In Cold Blood did, but The Executioner's Song did not.) Some of my examples are conventionally called “nonfiction novels” or true-life novels; others, especially those published since the 1980s, are not. Their immediacy, the research the writer has done, and her relationship with her subject make works like Janet Malcolm's three nonfiction books journalistic to me. Unlike Thomas Connery, who excludes essays and commentary from journalism, I use the term in its broadest sense to mean “writing about newsworthy subjects.” Because writers make whatever they are interested in “news” to others, they in effect make their subjects journalistic by writing about them.

Most of what I say theoretically about journalism applies to nonfiction in general, but that is a large category, and I wanted to choose a more limited category, for practical reasons. My historical approach suggested journalism because that is the kind of nonfiction Stephen Crane and many other American writers practiced and that is how many of them still start out.