Lee Gutkind, a writer and administrator of a creative-writing program whom Vanity Fair once dubbed the “godfather behind creative nonfiction,” has reached his golden years in triumph. That’s the bad news, maybe even for him. His professional self-audit, out earlier this year, is titled The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction (Yale University Press). A different writer would have called it Dog Catches Car.
Gutkind never anticipated “what might happen when the goal was finally achieved” — the goal being the widespread institutional acceptance of his genre. Planet Earth now has hundreds of M.F.A. programs and dozens of Ph.D. programs that grant degrees in creative nonfiction. Recently, Gutkind sensed “that a ‘fist-fighter’ wasn’t needed anymore. There was no one left to fight with.”
Gutkind bloodied his knuckles by writing books, teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, founding Creative Nonfiction, the first journal dedicated to the form, in 1994, and helping to launch a low-residency M.F.A. program at Goucher College. His mentees include Rebecca Skloot, who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the novelist Michael Chabon.
What drove Gutkind to battle for this Valhalla? The plight of the outsider, is his refrain. And it worked. The people “long ostracized by a white male good old boys’ network,” namely women and minorities, are today “the dominant voices of the genre,” he writes. Creative nonfiction allows “anyone with a story to tell, no matter how personal and intimate, no matter their background or education … to express themselves and justify and share their lives, their work, and their beliefs.” Gutkind, though white and male, feels like an outsider because he enjoys motorcycles and attended night school in the 1970s.
What were the fights about? Well, in this telling the old boys 50 years ago did not just hog the jobs and publishing contracts. They rigged the system against nonfiction. Fiction and Poetry, like warlords, squared their boots on the throats of postal workers, nurses, shop teachers, women, minorities, and people who liked motorcycles. Striving to write with excellence, the meek could hardly breathe. Born in a later decade, they might have “recast their lives in an authentic and dramatic fashion,” “found more success and satisfaction,” and possessed “the freedom to reveal themselves, as so many creative nonfictionists are doing today.”
Gutkind recounts a faculty meeting at Pitt in the 1970s at which a student petitioned the English department to run courses in the New Journalism, then fashionable. A professor in opposition held aloft works of canonical American literature, extolling their virtues before slamming them down. Until students could “read all of these books and learn to appreciate and understand them,” Gutkind ventriloquizes, “this department should never support such lightweight and insignificant work as what you think you are calling writing that is ‘new’ in journalism or nonfiction.” In that moment, Gutkind the pugilist was born. “I stood up and stomped a cleated boot down hard on the … floor to get more attention” and demanded that the colleague tell him “what stuff he had ever written that real people — nonacademics — could appreciate and understand.” Unreal people were put on notice.
The New Journalism laid the groundwork for the institutional rise of creative nonfiction. Tom Wolfe claimed the term by co-editing its first anthology (The New Journalism), in 1973. Wolfe wrote the introduction, which made big claims: The novel was moribund; the future of literature belonged to lone observers with audacious style, not stuffy newsroom guys. For at least a decade, he and the like-minded had been handling journalism like fiction in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune and Esquire. New Journalists started from scenes, not facts. They evoked characters through dialogue, not summary. They infused observations with the distinct flavor of the observing mind. Stars included Gay Talese, who applied it to celebrity profiles, Michael Herr, who applied it to the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer, who applied it to Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, whom people still read.
Long before the anthology appeared, Gutkind devoured Wolfe’s “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” when it ran in Esquire. He read the other New Journalists, too, and saw that nonfiction writing could be vivid, personal, topical, and literary all at once. Wolfe’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s portraits of the Hell’s Angels primed audiences for Gutkind’s first book, Bike Fever: On Motorcycle Culture (1973). Gutkind’s later subjects would include baseball, mental health, health care, robotics, and (for 30 years and counting) writing. By the 1990s, he embodied a generational shift. Creative nonfiction emerged from the New Journalism as yuppie emerged from hippie.
In its heyday, the New Journalism heralded revolution. Mainstream journalism was failing to capture the violent and surreal fever of the 1960s. The major papers, convinced of their objectivity, fostered distortion and corruption, and were staffed by people who cozied up to the Cold War establishment and declined to hire women or Black journalists. The reigning white guys seemed neutral and professional until you opened your eyes and looked around. The New Journalists believed that you couldn’t understand what you were reading about unless you knew who was writing, and that only a situated account could do justice to a complex situation. If they broke rules, it was because the rule-breaking was essential. A lack of obscenity, in times of obscenity, is obscene.
Lots of people embraced the dissident movement. Notable others — and not just racist governors and masters of war — found it hard to take. In his essay “Tiny Mummies!” Wolfe lampooned The New Yorker, playing loose with facts for effect. Dwight Macdonald came to the defense of the magazine, playing tight with facts. The clash dimmed Wolfe’s rising star for a minute and a half. It made Macdonald, an intellectual titan of a fading generation, appear geriatric and priggish in a way that still hasn’t quite worn off.
From the 1960s through the early 21st century, that asymmetry of pathos — the sense that the squares are in the wrong even when they’re in the right — authorized perennial defenses of charismatic mistruths and widespread shrugs of approval. At the peak of his career, Thompson got high a lot and destroyed property. He stole elk antlers from Ernest Hemingway’s house and reporting material from collaborators. Yet calling him criminal, circa 1972, would have amounted to grossly misplaced punctiliousness. You either heard him out or were condoning a worldview that was exactly part of the problem. As late as 2005, in an otherwise excellent history of the New Journalism (The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight), Marc Weingarten was still giving Thompson and Mailer and Wolfe a generous pass. Righteous boys will be boys.
By the end of the 1990s, Gutkind’s vision was on the brink of becoming everybody’s reality. In retrospect, you can behold the milestones with whiggish ease: Annie Dillard (famous for nonfiction) giving the keynote address at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in 1983, and debating with William Gass (famous for metafiction) what essays should do; Edward Abbey’s talk there in 1985; Best American Essays appearing for the first time in 1986; Gutkind founding Creative Nonfiction in 1994; and rival journals, like Fourth Genre and River Teeth, appearing in the late 1990s. Memoirs started to receive the buzz that once had been reserved for Great American Novels: Recall John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995), and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) — to name just the highest peaks of the range. (An aspiring writer named Barack Obama published his memoir in 1995.)
Most English departments and creative-writing programs, being academic, needed a decade to reflect the shift. Throughout the 1990s, M.F.A. programs remained geared to fiction and poetry. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop (which I attended from 1998 to 2000) was no exception. At the time, if you wanted a degree in nonfiction, Iowa offered one, but the workshop itself didn’t. Nonfiction lived in a different building and entailed a different application process and less prestige. Us snobs saw those kids around and condescended inwardly as we heard them talking about their work.
It was nonfiction, not fiction or poetry, that granted entree to Iowa City in the mid-1990s to the aspiring essayist John D’Agata, who would soon enough out-snob the best of us. In short order, hopping the invisible fence, he sought the favor of the poet Jorie Graham, won it, and enrolled in the workshop proper, graduating in 1998 with both the more prestigious degree in poetry and the less prestigious one in nonfiction. Ever since, D’Agata has shown little interest in poetry and ample interest in not being condescended to.
A generation younger than Gutkind, D’Agata today rivals Gutkind in the first rank of people who put academic creative nonfiction on the map. He returned to teach at Iowa in 2005 and assumed the directorship of the nonfiction track in 2013. Up that ladder he went in part by publishing essays but even more by fighting for them in the public square. His argument, at base, is Gutkind’s: Nonfiction counts. But if Gutkind’s ambition was to give the night-school nurses of Pittsburgh a seat at the table, D’Agata’s was both much smaller and much larger. It was to give “the essay” — as idiosyncratically defined by John D’Agata — a place in the history of literature since ancient Sumer.
From 2003 to 2016, D’Agata edited for Graywolf Press three anthologies that offered the field a canon. The Next American Essay (2003) includes pieces from the late 20th century, starting in 1975, the year D’Agata was born. The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) collects texts from the dawn of writing in ancient Mesopotamia to … 1974. And The Making of the American Essay (2016) anthologizes essays written in North America from 1630 to 1974. The trilogy ignores any conventional, generic, or historical definition of the essay. William Deresiewicz lambasted the series in The Atlantic in 2017 in a review too juicy with contempt and too replete with erudition to be missed. D’Agata’s anthologies do for creative nonfictionists something like what Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae did for the Anglo-Norman monarchs. Want a lineage running back to Aeneas? Invent one!
A Martian without an M.F.A. might guess that Gutkind and D’Agata would be buddies. But small differences seldom make for great friendships. In a rare, genuine moment of pugilism, Gutkind opines that “the D’Agata situation reminds me of the prevalence of the notion of fake news and alternative facts during the Trump administration.” Gutkind ascribes to Trump and D’Agata a single flavor of narcissism. By “the D’Agata situation” Gutkind means specifically The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), an experimental text, co-authored by D’Agata, that dramatizes a dispute between D’Agata and a fact-checker for The Believer named Jim Fingal.
Fingal, vetting an essay by D’Agata about suicide in Las Vegas, discovers a total mess. D’Agata collapses into a single day a series of events that occurred across weeks or months. He plays funny with statistical data. He confounds information about Las Vegas with information about Clark County with information about Nevada. He replaces attested numbers with numbers that sound better to his ear. And such liberties, far from being a one-off experiment, characterize D’Agata’s approach to writing across his oeuvre. There would be no problem (and no Lifespan, and no aggrieved Gutkind) if D’Agata called himself a fiction writer. But everything apparently rides on our ambiguous understanding of “the essay” as at once true like calculus and true like literature. For D’Agata, that means buckling calculus into the back seat and giving literature the keys.
The Lifespan of a Fact appeared as Obama’s first term was ending. Even then, a certain type of reader, including me, identified with D’Agata as he splendidly transfigured a dull America into enchanted columns of shimmering words. Secret energies came out. Truth was not a heap of numbers and dates but the embodied polyphony of disparate ways of knowing. D’Agata aestheticized what we had learned in college in the 1990s: that to accept the basic complacencies of the status quo was to kowtow to hegemony. Whoever grabbed the keys got to be a vigilante driving down tyranny!
Unfortunately for this cultural sphere, it wasn’t just just bookish guys with progressive politics who went into the key-grabbing business. And if it’s election integrity, not calculus, that gets buckled up in back, then the joy ride turns into a nightmare. Hence Gutkind’s comparison. D’Agata and Trump both seem to crave the power that comes with limits and also crave limitless power. Both stage spectacles in which charisma vanquishes frumpiness, like the Book of Daniel emerging from an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show.
Gutkind is not a Book of Daniel guy, motorcycle or no motorcycle. He wants nonfiction to be responsible and trustworthy, as democratic as a meeting of the town council. The question for creative-writing programs, then, is, Which vision is the rightful heir? Does the history of the institution point to D’Agata’s reality? Or Gutkind’s?
In the late 19th century, critics and writers invented “literature.” That’s a thesis they teach you in grad school, and it turns out to be less preposterous than it sounds. Not until 150 years ago or so did literariness come to exist as a pure quality, divorced from content, along the lines of how paint in a Jackson Pollock work is a pure medium, divorced from the kind of things that an avant-garde painter might have depicted before the change, like apples or prostitutes.
Literature as pure literariness, the theory goes, rebutted positivistic science. Fiction and poetry — the premier literary genres in this new sense — increasingly charted courses antagonistic to knowledge centered on mere matter. As chemists and geologists were accounting for molecules and geodes with ever-greater precision, ambitious writers let referentiality slide. Can anybody really tell exactly what the hell Baudelaire is saying? Or Joseph Conrad? Well, that’s the point.
French symbolist poets made the original breakthrough, but by the 20th century lots of people were endowing words with fresh artistic intensity. The practice could be fetishistic, incantatory, dazzling, almost religious, or in fact religious. In weird combination, the revolutionary styles often got applied to less-than-revolutionary content: mythology, archetypes from Jung, or the deep symbols of Western history. Bid farewell to Balzac, Dickens, Zola, and their reportorial projects. Here was literary language in service of dead or living gods. Such language could make modern life, which was generally profane, glow with ironic holiness. The distinction between poetry and fiction seemed destined to vanish: James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” played similar half-shadowy, half-numinous games.
After 1945, the cult of literariness allowed English departments in the United States to feature modern literature without shame. The subject matter was difficult and rarefied, well beyond the purview of geologists. You had to know the myths and revere with intelligence the irrational power of words. The dispensation established a beachhead for creative writing as an academic discipline. If Joyce and Eliot — or Franz Kafka or Henry James or whoever — warranted a place in the curriculum, then naturally people trying to write like them deserved an office on campus. The first graduate students in creative writing did not want to be journalists — they were gunning to write scripture: words never seen before telling stories that never aged.
The global political climate in the 1950s fortified the place of fiction and poetry in the curriculum. Perhaps literature at its most literary could solve problems that other modes of knowing had not only not solved but exacerbated horrifically. Auschwitz did not make the scientific management of human bodies look so great. Hiroshima and Nagasaki shined grim light on physics. Poems and novels offered an antidote to instrumental destructiveness, a common language steeped in deathless mythemes. Figures as unalike as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Julian Huxley, and Lionel Trilling entertained the idea.
Poems and novels also protected minds against propaganda. The best of the new writing was too complex and too hesitating to serve stupid ideologies. Train people in it, and the appeal of demagogues would be throttled. Mussolini spoke one language of the 20th century. Wallace Stevens spoke a very different one. The liberal establishment cast its lot with Stevens.
By the 1990s, this postwar vision for creative-writing programs had lost its mojo. Auschwitz, atom bombs, and propaganda did not haunt aspiring writers as living threats. Writing workshops engendered more personal reflection than high ambition — and always had. Since the inception of the discipline, in the 1930s, most people have simply liked writing about themselves in pretty words. Yet the notion that fiction and poetry were of immense consequence to human destiny held on. An institution in the habit of taking itself seriously seldom stops.
For Gutkind, the postwar grandiosity had overstayed its welcome even in the 1970s. His colleague at Pitt who denounced the New Journalists was a dinosaur. Gutkind looked forward to a future in which pompous mountains flattened to an egalitarian plain. D’Agata, a short generation later, wanted the mountains back.
I did, too. At Iowa in the late 1990s, the postwar momentousness rang awkwardly in diminished classrooms. It took no plausible form. As I argued in 2014, the pure literariness of language had hardened into an institutional convention. M.F.A. students mastered crystalline sentence-writing and the mass production of temporarily transfixing metaphors and images centered on their own lives. Without the backdrop of Victorian windiness, which had been its original foil, such language existed in a historical vacuum, retaining local prestige at best. As for myth — for the shared-narrative inheritance of the Family of Man, the archetypes of Jung, the stories we hold in common — well, that part of the original M.F.A. dispensation was even deader. Perhaps in an alternative universe, M.F.A. programs could have remained the place where you read old books and tried to fashion new ones in their spirit. But as modernism receded, so did any collective fealty to three millennia of text. Year by year, institutionalized creative writing grew shallower, though it had never been that deep to begin.
To be clear, this waxing shallowness should not be confused with the simultaneous diversification of the faculty and students, which remains to this day incomplete but which, even so, is the major source of any glory that writing programs now possess. The problem, though, is that writers from the former cultural margins arrived on a scene fast jettisoning its own cultural standing. Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (adapted into the feature film American Fiction last year) makes clear that diminishment as an essay never could. It depicts a Black novelist who can’t sell books because his books aren’t “Black” enough. If contemporary writers of color want to write about myths, in other words, they’re even worse off than the white writers perennially have been. This is the dystopian side of Gutkind’s utopia: Groups long silenced may finally join the conversation just as long as they promise to talk about themselves personally. Racism was shown to the door, but with it ambition. How (Everett asks) is that, in a way, not as bad as racism? Or, racism?
Since the early 2000s, the heart of the creative-writing discipline has been neither stylistic nor mythological. Gutkind has reacted by celebrating the revolution, bidding so long to prestige and howdy to inclusiveness, as if identity and genre were inseparable. D’Agata has raged against the loss, insisting that pure literature — the stuff that once upon a time was invented in repudiation of referentiality — could, in fact, conquer referentiality. Fiction and poetry were deposed, yes. But what if the essay could climb onto the empty throne? In short, both D’Agata and Gutkind have labored on behalf of keeping literature — and especially nonfiction — big in an age when it isn’t any longer. Complicating matters is that, for now, their efforts seem to be working.
In 2018, Jonathan Kramnick contrasted hiring trends in English in the 1990s to those 20 years later. From 1995 to 1998, he found, colleges advertised 2,262 tenure-track assistant-professor positions in the field; from 2015 to 2018, they advertised over a thousand fewer. But amid this huge decline, creative-writing positions not only held steady but ticked up, from 176 in the earlier period to 197 two decades later. The institutional numbers tell the same story. In 1994, according to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, there were 64 M.F.A. programs in creative writing; by 2012, that number had more than tripled. And within this relative prosperity, creative nonfiction offers perhaps the greatest success story. English departments that added a creative-writing track in the 1990s and 2000s in many cases supplemented their faculties — the poets and fiction writers — with professors in nonfiction. M.F.A. programs similarly revamped themselves. My own department, at Providence College, hired in creative nonfiction just last year.
The institutional shifts reflect a national swing that has real stakes. Nonfiction flattens what was already growing flat. Cherished texts have traditionally retained interest over the centuries by towering in their seeming significance. The 2,400-year conversation between Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton is bigger than the works of any up-and-coming essayist. You don’t go to Milton to learn how he lived, but to see what he read and imagined. Our scriptures, whether secular or sacred, exist in meanings that are larger than any given reader or writer. But to utter that — even at a whisper, even with a tentative inflection, even with apologies, even with a wink from John Guillory, even with a confession that one feels radiating from those stodgy names the same core boringness that everybody sane feels, even pointing to writers (like Everett) from historically marginalized groups who have played the long game with utter brilliance — is to sound too much like the PR guy for Hillsdale College. Americans have lost faith and interest in writing that has towered in importance across time. D’Agata’s goofy anthology, in which he groups himself with Eannatum of Akkad, only proves the point.
Creative-writing programs at the dawn of the Cold War did not aim to diminish literature. If anything, it was the opposite. Postwar liberalism depended on rules and laws, the stuff of city halls and state legislatures and Congress. But at the same time postwar liberalism needed a sturdy home for ghosts and passions. Ghosts and passions in the voting booth, as the 1930s and 1940s had shown, led to disaster. That is what Lionel Trilling was getting at in The Liberal Imagination when he argued that liberalism “drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination,” creating a void that fascists and Stalinists would step in to fill if literature professors failed to.
Social Security numbers, polite debates, and state-funded universities are boring. They are immanent, workaday. Facts, too, are boring. The heart yearns for transcendence. After 1945, conceding the chasm between democratic manners and spiritual excitements, educators opted to split the immanent from the transcendent. Politics should be politics (preferably as dull as Dwight Eisenhower) and literature, literature (preferably as robust and demonic as D.H. Lawrence). If that well-intentioned experiment has finally and fully gone up in flames, the question will be whether, from now on, there’s any difference between literature and politics, and, if not, which literature and whose politics?
