Does it matter if Joseph Mitchell embellished his journalism?

He is long known to have used composite characters and a new biography will reveal more embellishments – but perhaps that’s the magic of his workOver the weekend, the feathers of American literary journalists ruffled lightly in the breeze of a review that appeared in the New York Review of Books. The review, written by longtime New Yorker staff writer Janet Malcolm, was of an upcoming biography of another New Yorker staff writer, Joseph Mitchell, due to be published in the United States on 28 April. Malcolm’s review can be read as a pre-emptive defence of Mitchell’s legacy as one of the giants of American literary journalism. The biographer in question, Thomas Kunkel, has apparently found more evidence of what was already somewhat known: that Mitchell embellished his nonfiction, often condensing characters and facts to smooth out his stories. In one already well-known example, a long piece called Old Mr Flood condenses several men’s stories into the titular Mr Flood. Mitchell admitted this openly in a preface to the book later published under that name.He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2015-04-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #roman empire

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[ The Bookseller | 2015-01-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2015-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2015-01-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2015-01-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-12-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-11-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-11-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Guardian | 2014-09-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-09-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Digiday | 2014-09-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Digiday | 2014-09-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors on the Air September 5, 2014: Mitchell Zuckoff/The Annex Security Team, Christian Rudder

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-09-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Advertising Age | 2014-09-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Editor & Publisher | 2014-07-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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