Introduction

This chapter provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and international study of American literary journalism, engaging with such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, African American studies, gender studies, visual studies, media studies, and American studies, in addition to journalism and literary studies. There is an equally urgent need to document the historical existence of a narrative form that exhibits a constant tension between factual evidence and the writer’s imagination that conjures such evidence into a story. In addition to being a method or technique, the literary journalism of American writers such as Walt Whitman, Fanny Fern, Frederick Douglass, Meridel Le Sueur, James Agee, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion, while representing a certain narrative epistemology, demonstrates a tension between “fact” and “art,” uniquely well suited to express and represent American culture. Although the international presence of literary journalism is of vital importance, the value of the form in time demands more than a grasp of an enlarged global circuitry.