Literary Journalism

Literary journalism can be understood as part of the larger genre of literary nonfiction. Literary nonfiction itself is a wide-ranging category that can include journalism, memoirs and other autobiographical writing, essays, history, biography, and scholarly articles.

Literary journalism, sometimes called creative nonfiction, literary reportage, the literature of fact, and the nonfiction novel, is fact-based, in-depth reporting that uses literary techniques of writing. Examples of these storytelling techniques, which are commonly used in both literary fiction and literary nonfiction, include description, scene-setting, dialogue, dramatization, and characterization (to name a few).

And like other literary works, such as the novel, literary journalism usually expresses a larger or “literary” truth about some universal aspect of human experience. Thus, Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897), [Page 947]a work of literary journalism ...