Tom Bissell on Truth in Travel Literature

Tom Bissell, a contributing editor to VQR, weighs in on the “truth & nonfiction” debate in a great essay looking at truth in travel literature posted at World Hum.

The great nonfiction writer Lawrence Weschler once said to me that there are two kinds of nonfiction writers: Those who basically accept the idea that some type of fictionalizing almost always occurs in narrative nonfiction and those who cannot accept this idea. I am of the former camp. That said, what [James] Frey did is clearly beyond the pale.