The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne'er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction

by Lee Gutkind

Overview

An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the “godfather” of the genre
 
“When [Gutkind] stops to look back on his own evolving perspective . . . [and] reflects upon his writing career, the choices he made . . . he puts himself, and us, right back in the moment—and the results are vivid, ambiguous, emotionally resonant, fascinating.”—Lucas Mann, Washington Post
 
In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction. In this book Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers.
 
Creative nonfiction—true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies—offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened doors to outsiders—doctors, lawyers, construction workers—who felt they had stories to tell about their lives and experiences.
 
Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. Gutkind also highlights the ethics of writing creative nonfiction, including how writers handle the distinctions between fact and fiction.
 
Gutkind’s book narrates the story not just of a genre but of the person who brought it to the forefront of the literary and journalistic world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300251159
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/23/2024
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	300,255
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lee Gutkind has been called the “Godfather behind creative nonfiction” by Vanity Fair. He founded Creative Nonfiction magazine in 1994 and is the editor or author of more than thirty books. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

Editorial Reviews

11/27/2023

Gutkind (My Last Eight-Thousand Days), founder of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction, provides an enlightening critical history of the genre. He finds the seeds of creative nonfiction in such genre-defying works as Daniel Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year, which recreated the 1665 Great Plague of London through the eyes of a fictional narrator. Elsewhere, Gutkind notes that decades before Tom Wolfe gained fame as a practitioner of New Journalism, reporters Marvel Cooke and Ida B. Wells were employing the genre’s defining techniques (writing in scenes, strong authorial voice) in their reportage on life in New York City and lynching in the American South. Thoughtfully probing controversies stirred up by creative nonfiction, Gutkind recounts how New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm’s presentation of interviews she’d conducted with an embattled psychoanalyst over the course of months as taking place over a single meal, and adjustment of quotations to sell the illusion, resulted in a protracted legal battle after her subject sued for misrepresenting him (the case was decided in Malcolm’s favor). The literary history fascinates, though Gutkind’s accounts of arguing with his colleagues in the University of Pittsburgh English department on behalf of creative nonfiction’s merits drag in comparison. Still, it adds up to a thorough appraisal of the genre. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

When [Gutkind] stops to look back on his own evolving perspective . . . [and] reflects upon his writing career, the choices he made . . . he puts himself, and us, right back in the moment—and the results are vivid, ambiguous, emotionally resonant, fascinating.”—Lucas Mann, Washington Post

“Lee Gutkind’s brisk historical account of how a set of borrowed modalities became ‘the fourth genre’ is deftly interleaved with anecdotes and insights drawn from a lifetime as a practitioner.”—J. Michael Lennon, Times Literary Supplement

“An enlightening critical history . . . [that] adds up to a thorough appraisal of the genre.”—Publishers Weekly

“This memoir/critical history will please some readers and tick off others, which seems to be precisely the point. . . . Budding journalists and students of creative writing will find plenty of red meat in Gutkind’s pages.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting . . . is often a graceful blend of memoir and history. . . . It is both informing and entertaining, and [Gutkind’s] description of his assault on the ivy towers is one that aspiring writers and beginning professors need to hear.”—Michael Pearson, New York Journal of Books

“A chronicle of the pitched battles that took place during a decades-long war of attrition and détente, finally arriving at the culture’s capitulation to the idea of creative nonfiction as a distinct literary form. . . . Gutkind is a feisty pugilist.”—David Daniel, Arts Fuse

Named a Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

“Gutkind has done more than trace a shift in academic thinking. . . . He has documented one aspect of a cultural shift toward viewing the stories of outsiders, outcasts, and people without power as valuable, a subversive shift that threatens the primacy of those in power.”—Christy Moore, Hippocampus Magazine

“Gutkind [has] 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, [the] efforts seem to be working.”—Eric Bennett, Chronicle of Higher Education

“The ‘fist fight’ seems an apt metaphor to describe Lee Gutkind’s resolute defense of creative nonfiction—in all its forms. His characteristic thoughtful conviction keeps it new and exciting for the rest of us.”—Yvette Benavides, host of Texas Public Radio’s Book Public

“The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting offers an insightful overview of the recent history of creative nonfiction and the struggles that early practitioners faced in legitimizing the genre. This is a must-read for all writers.”—Jennifer Anderson, Lewis-Clark State College

“Lee Gutkind is not only a master of creative nonfiction. He’s also a crucial catalyst who has meaningfully advanced the field. This honest, engagingly written book tells how it all happened and why creative nonfiction is so necessary.”—Steven Beschloss, director of the Narrative Storytelling Initiative and author of The Gunman and His Mother

From the Publisher

2023-11-14
An in-the-trenches view of the birth and growth of creative nonfiction.

Although he admits to being a motorcycle-riding outsider without many academic credentials and plenty of opinions, Gutkind, author of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, promises a little more mayhem with his title than he delivers. Sure, he has an elephant graveyard’s worth of bones to pick with some writers—John D’Agata, keep your eyes peeled—and he admires a few brawling writers (Hemingway, Mailer). The fist-fighting he mentions is of a more genteel kind, however: the sniffy dismissals of creative nonfiction as “bullshit,” in the words of one New York Times Book Review editor, who added, “I don’t know what it is other than people making stuff up.” Gutkind’s definition is more circumstantial. Though the genre allows for some embroidering, creative nonfiction is a more or less factual way of detailing the episodes (“writing in scenes”) that make up people’s lives, whether one’s own or another’s. In this, creative nonfiction owes broadly to the new journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, with exponents such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. Gutkind sagely notes that this broad leeway has allowed for women and members of ethnic and social minorities to forge ahead somewhat more fully than in other fields. Among his most admired exemplars is Joan Didion, who “labored over each sentence, establishing an intimacy with her voice that would sustain her work and inspire readers and writers far longer than most of the other new journalists,” and James Baldwin, whose essays of the 1950s perhaps prefigured new journalism. Whatever the case, this memoir/critical history will please some readers and tick off others, which seems to be precisely the point.

Budding journalists and students of creative writing will find plenty of red meat in Gutkind’s pages.

Kirkus Reviews