A scholar (?) who presented today on the Book-TV
program a very interesting lecture on creative
nonfiction sort of credited Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe
with innovating the supposedly new way of writing
called creative nonfiction in the 1960s/1970s, but he
noted that Hemingway had done something awfully
similar in Death in the Afternoon (although he failed
to mention Green Hills of Africa, which by the
presenter's own definition, which he said he resented
being asked to give because the genre is a bit
slippery to define, also meets the criteria).

Now I truly regret that the presenter, whose name I
think was Lee Gutkind, has not read Innocents Abroad,
Roughing It, and an essay or two by the little know
former typesetter from Hannibal. He is such a minor
event in American literature that his name escapes me,
but I think it was Sam, or Mark, or Matthew, or Luke,
or John, Paul, George, or Ringo. Does anyone on this
list have any knowledge of this  earlier attempter at
creative nonfiction--seems like he wrote an
autobiograghy also that was terribly creative, if not
downright sinfully invented at times. Not that I
quibble over a lie when it makes me laugh. This same
small light from Missouri may also have invented "the
new journalis" the way I see it in his Life on the
Mississippi if not in one of the other texts
mentioned, but that is for wiser heads to determine.

Uncreatively truly yours, Doug Bridges