Research Guide to American Literature

received Pulitzer Prizes for Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994). One of the
most important dramatists of the contemporary period, Sam Shepard, has premiered
his experimental plays in Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, and regional theaters.
Realism has not disappeared from American drama; David Mamet’s American Buf-
falo (1976) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1982) employ realistic settings and mundane
characters whose speech mimics everyday conversation. Their use of language that is
fragmented and sprinkled with clichés, however, calls attention to the superficiality
of defining the American Dream and masculinity in terms of money. Elements that
break the realism of David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly (1988)—the main character
directly addressing the audience and the use of flashbacks—nevertheless convey
psychological realism and problems related to racism and imperialism. The presence
of a ghost in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987) is not mere fancy but sug-
gests an African-centered cultural perspective that challenges that of mainstream
America. Since 1970 playwrights such as Reed, Frank Chin, María Irene Fornés,
Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, Paula
Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson have expanded American theater
to include representations of identities previously excluded on the basis of class, race,
gender, and sexual orientation.
Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood (1965), the “New Journalism”
pioneered in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Gonzo Journal-
ism”—a term he coined in 1970—led to the development of “creative nonfiction.”
Combining factual reporting with narrative techniques borrowed from fiction,
creative nonfiction features multiple points of view, including first-person, scene-
by-scene construction; an emphasis on “color” details to draw out the character of
people and places; close observation; and extensive use of dialogue. Writers who
employ these techniques in their journalistic works include Joan Didion, Norman
Mailer, Barbara Ehrenreich, John McPhee, and Gail Sheehy, while Susan Cheever,
Adam Gopnik, Andrew X. Pham, and Tobias Wolff use them to shape their mem-
oirs. As Lee Gutkind explains on the website of the literary journal Creative Nonf ic-
tion, these “writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that
already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.”
The use of creative elements in nonfiction has called attention to the ethics
of mixing fiction and fact. Delivering a talk at Goucher College in 2003, Vivian
Gornick shocked her audience when she admitted inventing scenes and using
composite characters in Fierce Attachments (1987), an account of her relationship
with her mother. Her former Village Voice editor admonished her, as did other writ-
ers and readers. The criticism she has received, however, does not compare to that
aimed at James Frey after it was revealed that he had embellished and even invented
aspects of A Million Little Pieces (2003), his “memoir” of drug addiction. His failure
to emphasize what he remembered rather than what he imagined led to the loss of
his literary agent; a televised face-to-face rebuke by Oprah Winfrey, whose promo-
tion of the book on her show had led to its best-seller status; and a legal settlement
entitling a refund to readers who felt defrauded by the book’s claim to be nonfic-
tion. Writers and readers will continue to engage in discussions related to accuracy,
creative expression, responsibility, and genre distinctions as creative nonfiction con-
tinues to be studied and developed in the twenty-first century.

Dominant Genres and Literary Forms 7