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Introduction: A Sibling Rivalry in American Letters

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Abstract

One might have guessed that his star had blazed and faded. Dead for more than two decades, his best-known book little more than a memory, Truman Capote, it seemed, had gone the way of Rachel Carson. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, director Bennett Miller resurrected the reputation of the one-time literary celebrity, turning the story of his research for In Cold Blood into one of the most acclaimed films of 2005. Another film by another director followed, as did a new edition of his best-known novel. Just like that, Capote was back.

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Notes

  1. Ann Reilly Dowd, “The Great Pretender,” Columbia Journalism-Review 37 (July/August 1998): 14–15.

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  6. Cynthia Miller, “Introduction: At Play in the Fields of the Truth,” Post Script 28 (Summer 2009): 3–8.

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  7. Ronald Zboray provides an extensive discussion of these and other factors in A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). I explore developments such as these in greater depth in chapters 1 and 2.

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  8. Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 135, 140–46

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  9. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 304

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  10. See also Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 63–64.

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  11. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), 115.

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  12. Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3–14

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  13. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 55

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  14. Edgar M. Branch, introduction to Early Tales & Sketches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 26

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  15. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)

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  16. Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)

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  17. Fred Fedler, Media Hoaxes (Ames, LA: Iowa State University Press, 1989); Roggenkamp, Narrating the News.

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  18. Jerome McGann, “Rethinking the Center, Remapping the Culture: Poe and the American Renaissance” (panel discussion at the Edgar A. Poe Bicentennial Symposium, Charlottesville, VA, April 3–4, 2009).

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  19. Philip Bennett, interview with Frank Stasio, The State of Things, North Carolina Public Radio, 12 October 2009, http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/search_media?review_state=published&start.query:record:list:date=2009-10-12%2023%3A59%3A59&start.range: record=max&end.query:record:list:date=2009-10-12%2000% 3A00%3A00&end.range:record=min&path=/websites/wuncplone_webslingerz_com/tsot/archive&month:int=10&year:int=2009. Bennett was responding to Stasio, who, alluding to the failure of investigative journalism to resonate with audiences, asked, “Do we have to find a different way to tell stories, or do we give up?” After answering in the affirmative, Bennett added, “I don’t know what that way is. I think we need to feel our way towards it. I think we’re sort of stuck in a rhythm that was established a generation ago with New Journalism and devices that were used for long-form narrative writing that have scarcely received an update, even though the world of communications and technology has changed so dramatically.”

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© 2011 Mark Canada

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Canada, M. (2011). Introduction: A Sibling Rivalry in American Letters. In: Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118591_1

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