I enjoyed Doug Bridges' rambles and snarls on creative non-fiction. I've taught courses on the stuff (with great pleasure) and done some reading and thinking about it. As Doug rightly implies, efforts have been made to define "creative nonfiction" or similar terms in such a way as to "prove" that it began with this writer or that . . . but the efforts strike me as pretty unconvincing. They mostly remind me of an ancient country joke-- Q.: If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have? A.: Four, because callin' it a leg don't make it one. A list of the finest American creative nonfiction could certainly begin with St. Mark of Hannibal. And yet, I believe that even before him there was a feller named Hank who went to live by a pond up Massachusetts way for a couple of years..... Somewhat more seriously, in both America and Britain the landscape of great non-fiction is enormously rich and diversified, and continues to grow. Yet even for many sophisticated readers it's unknown terrain, simply because they've never mentally categorized books or other writings that way. Nor do most bookstores view it as a category: If they carry Death in the Afternoon, they'll stash it with Hemingway's novels; and Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, with Twain's novels; and Travels with Charley, with Steinbeck's novels. John McPhee's various books might be split and scattered by their subject matter (geology, or whatever), rather than grouped together to reflect a stellar contemporary nonfiction career. Bill Bryson will be stashed in "Humor," and Capote's In Cold Blood in a "True Crime" section...... There seems to be very little general perception of artistic nonfiction as a worthy genre. Mark Coburn [log in to unmask]