Kill Your Idols: "In Cold Blood"

Small Town Guy · Feb 14, 2013

Thought of David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing with the latest cruise ship debacle in the news. Like others on the board, I enjoyed his nonfiction more than his fiction, or at least found it more accessible. But do we have to reevaulate those pieces since many of the anecdotes in them were fiction? Franzen talked about this and in his DFW bio, D.T. Max wrote about it:

Wallace was aware that he had transgressed, and many times he hinted to journalists that their rules weren’t his, as in an interview he gave to a writer for the Boston Phoenix in 1998. ‘The thing is, really — between you and me and the Boston Phoenix’s understanding readers — you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there’s going to be an occasional bit of embellishment.’
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Small Town Guy · Mar 20, 2013

Really interesting piece about the guy who fact-checked the original stories for the New Yorker.

http://tinyurl.com/bm3zaat

Also in the file are the galley proofs from which Campbell worked. Again, his work seems to be all about the dates and distances: Campbell underlines in pencil every proper name and checkable fact, for example: “The pheasant season in Kansas, a famed November event …” He also shows a sharp eye for internal inconsistencies. He circles a place in the galley where someone is referred to as a “cleaning woman.” The same woman, he notes, is called “housekeeper” at another point, thousands of words away.
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But verifying the “nonfiction novel” aspects of the article does not seem to have been part of Campbell’s brief. They are, in any case, not underlined. To use a New Yorker term of art that was widely reported more than a quarter-century later, when Janet Malcolm was sued for libel by a disgruntled psychoanalyst, those things seem to have been “on author.” To a large extent, The New Yorker of 1965 was the same magazine of the ‘40s and ‘50s, where no one raised an eyebrow when luminaries such as A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell trafficked in composite characters—Colonel Stingo and Mr. Flood, respectively.
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Kill Your Idols: "In Cold Blood"

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Kill Your Idols: "In Cold Blood"

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