From Fact to Fiction

Book excerpt: Focusing on the lives and careers of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, Fishkin offers the first full-length study to examine the tradition in American letters since the 1830s of great imaginative writers beginning their careers in journalism. Her probing examination of the poetry and fiction that followed the newspaper and magazine work of these writers reveals how each transformed fact into art and how journalismhas helped to give a distinctively American cast to American literature.