ABSTRACT
For Robert Penn Warren, fiction’s particular contribution to history is the novelist’s freedom to represent the details of mental states, the “undocumentable inside” denied to historians and biographers by their reliance on documentation. Had he been asked, I imagine he would have considered a more literal human inside-the stuff of bodies-to be documentable, especially by medicine, and thus not special to fiction’s domain. But what happens when the author of a biographical novel decides to pay more attention to the insides of the body than to the mind?
