The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the slang term "faction", a
portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsAndré Breton's ''
Nadja
Nadja may refer to:
* Nadja (given name)
* Nadja, pen-name of Louisa Nadia Green (1896—1934), British poet
* ''Nadja'' (novel), 1928 surrealist novel by André Breton
* ''Nadja'' (film), 1994 vampire film by Michael Almereyda
* Nadja (band)
...
'' (1928) and several books by the Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval, such as ''
Ulice Git-le-coeur
''Ulice'' is a Czech soap opera produced by Nova (Czech TV), Nova. It is aired five times a week. In Czech language, Czech ''ulice'' means 'street'.
The show describes the lives of the Farský, Jordán, Boháč, Nykl, Liška and Maléř families ...
'' (1936). One of the early English books in the genre is
Rebecca West
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books ...
's ''
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia'' is a travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941 in two volumes by Macmillan in the UK and by The Viking Press in the US.
The book is over 1,100 pages in modern edit ...
'' (1941). Jim Bishop's ''The Glass Crutch'' (1945) was advertised as "one of the most unusual best-sellers ever published—a non-fiction novel." Perhaps the most influential nonfiction novel of the twentieth century was John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946). Scholar David Schmid writes that "many American writers during the post-World War II period, including Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, hoseto follow Hersey’s lead."
In ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
, as she becomes part of the "Joy Division," a
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
system keeping Jewish women as sex slaves in concentration camps. The book's plot was inspired by the Dinur's experience from the Holocaust and his younger sister, who did not survive the Holocaust.
Works of
history
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...
or
biography
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or c ...
have often used the narrative devices of fiction to depict real-world events. Scholars have suggested that the novel '' Operación Masacre'' (1957) by the Argentine author and journalist Rodolfo Walsh was the first non-fiction novel in Spanish.
José León Suárez massacre
José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced differently in each language: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ).
In French, the name ''José'', pronounced , is an old vernacu ...
, which involved the unlawful capture and shooting of twelve innocent civilians by a
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
' Chief of Police, during an unrelated military uprising by the rebel leader
Juan José Valle
Juan José Valle (March 15, 1896 – June 12, 1956) was an Argentine general who headed a rebellion in 1956 against General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's dictatorship.
Rebellion
Aramburu's ''Revolución Libertadora'' of September 1955 had ended Jua ...
.Rodolfo Walsh and the Struggle for Argentina, by Stephen Phelan October 28, 2013, '' Boston Review'' These events followed a 1955 military coup, self-titled as “ Revolución Libertadora” (“The Liberating Revolution”), which deposed the Argentine constitutional president Juan Domingo Perón and installed a dictatorship (whose leader was the hard-line general Pedro Eugenio Aramburu) into power. The book's style makes use of a constant shift between the first and third person narrative, with the protagonist's voices heard throughout the narration, interspersed with facts and details of the events described.
Capote's ''In Cold Blood''
Truman Capote later adopted the genre. He argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-person narration and, ideally, free of any mention of the novelist. He was immediately intrigued after reading the story of the Clutter murders in ''The New York Times'', and used the events surrounding the crime as a basis for '' In Cold Blood'' (1965). He spent years tracking the story, spent considerable time with the people involved, watched hours of film footage, listened to recordings, and read transcripts and notes. He once claimed that everything within the book would be true, word for word. To gather details, Capote interviewed the murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. But Ben Yagoda notes that "almost from the start, skeptics challenged the accuracy of ''In Cold Blood.'' One early revelation (acknowledged by Capote before his death in 1984) was that the last scene in the book, a graveyard conversation between a detective and the murdered girl’s best friend, was pure invention."
In his review of the book in ''The American Scholar'', Robert Langbaum wrote, "Once we look at structure, we find many nonfiction works as artful and sometimes more artful than many novels. Northrop Frye has, in his influential ''Anatomy of Criticism'', gone so far as to apply the word ''fiction'' to any 'work of art in prose.' ... By taking apoteat his word and comparing his book to a novel, we can both appreciate his achievement and see its limits. For its best effects are novelistic and it falls short just where it is not novelistic enough."
According to Queeney
''According to Queeney'' is a 2001 Booker-longlisted biographical novel by English writer Beryl Bainbridge. It concerns the last years of Samuel Johnson and his relationship between Hester Thrale and her daughter ' Queeney'. The bulk of the nov ...
'' (2001) by
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. Bainbridge won the ...
, which describes the last few years of Samuel Johnson's life as seen through the eyes of Queeney Thrale.
* '' Dispatches'' (1977), by Michael Herr which reflects on the journalist's reporting from Vietnam.
* '' The Day of the Jackal'' (1971) by Frederick Forsyth describes the attempt by the OAS to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, who they believe is a traitor to France after he declares independence to Algeria. Although the opening depiction of the assassination attempt as planned by Bastien-Thiry is true, the subsequent plot is totally fictional.
Tom Wolfe's '' The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (1968) was an example of the school of New Journalism (often characterized as an invention of the mid-1960s). The novel is hybridized with journalistic narration, which, like Capote's prose, places little emphasis on the process of narration (although Wolfe, unlike Capote, occasionally narrates from first-person).
Hunter S. Thompson's approach of " Gonzo Journalism" (in books like '' Hell's Angels'' (1966)) abandoned Capote's narrative style to intermingle personal experiences and observations with more traditional journalism.
Reduced usage
Since the 1970s, the non-fiction novel has somewhat fallen out of favor. However, forms such as the extended
essay
An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...
, the memoir, and the biography (and autobiography), as well as autofiction, can explore similar territory. Joan Didion, for instance, has never called her own work a "non-fiction novel", while she has been repeatedly credited for doing so with what she generally calls "extended" or "long" essays.
''A Tomb for Boris Davidovich''
''
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
''A Tomb for Boris Davidovich'' ( Serbo-Croatian: ''Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča / Гробница за Бориса Давидовича'') is a collection of seven short stories by Danilo Kiš written in 1976 (translated into English by Dusk ...
'' (Serbo-Croatian: ''Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča / Гробница за Бориса Давидовича'') is a collection of seven short stories by Danilo Kiš published in 1976 (and translated into English by Duska Mikic-Mitchell in 1978). The stories are based on historical events and deal with themes of political deception, betrayal, and murder in Eastern Europe during the first half of the 20th century (except for "Dogs and Books", which takes place in 14th century France). Several of the stories are written as fictional biographies wherein the main characters interact with historical figures. The Dalkey Archive Press edition includes an introduction by Joseph Brodsky and an afterword by William T. Vollmann. Harold Bloom includes ''A Tomb for Boris Davidovich'' in his list of canonical works of the period he names the Chaotic Age (1900–present) in The Western Canon. The book is featured in Penguin's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s, edited by
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
.
Later works classified as non-fiction novels include ''The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey: A Nonfiction Novel'' (1993) by Bland Simpson, which tells the dramatic story of the disappearance of 19-year-old Nell Cropsey from her riverside home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in November 1901; '' In the Time of the Butterflies'' (1995) by Julia Alvarez, which fictionalizes the lives of the Mirabal sisters who gave their lives fighting a dictatorship in the
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with ...
, based on their accounts; and '' A Civil Action'' (1996) by Jonathan Harr, which describes the drama caused by a real-life water contamination scandal in Massachusetts in the 1980s.
Homer Hickam, author of ''
Rocket Boys
''October Sky '' is the first memoir in a series of four, by American engineer Homer Hickam Jr. originally published in 1998 as ''Rocket Boys''. Later editions were published under the title ''October Sky'' as a tie-in to the 1999 film adaptat ...
'' (1998) and other well-known memoirs, has described his work as novel-memoirs or "novoirs", wherein he uses novelistic techniques, including fictional conversations, to allow the essential truth of his stories to be revealed.