I came across No Name Woman in my current favourite essay collection: The Best American Essays of the Century (edited by Joyce Carol Oates). I later learned the essay is the first section of Maxine Hong Kingston’s beloved 1976 memoir: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Amongst Ghosts. 

It begins with an arresting first sentence. “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”

From there, it’s the story of a missing aunt, one who is never mentioned, who shamed the family and was betrayed by them. An illegitimate pregnancy, a suicide. A broken heart. A family stitching itself together again with only silence for thread.

It’s written in sparse, mysterious prose, requiring a close read to figure out what might be fact and what might be imagined.

Kingston reveals how she spent years dwelling on the story her mother gave her. Imagining first an illicit love for her aunt, she then gave her a wild romance. And then, a realisation: maybe it was something awful. Or maybe her aunt just wanted sex.

But that’s not the whole story. Kingston is a Chinese-American woman, and in her hands, the tragedy of her father’s sister also becomes a story about identity in diaspora. It becomes a story about being Chinese and American, and about trying to work out what is an essentially Chinese experience… and what is just her family’s, her mother’s, her unique experience. She doesn’t know how to handle the story her mother has told her, of the no-name woman, and she asks, “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”

Like Kingston, I also grew in up two cultures, though mine were Indian and American. And for me, this essay gets something exactly right about the experience of growing up Western and being from a culture that thinks low of women. It’s a familiar wide-eyed horror of knowing you could have, so easily, had another life entirely. The no-name woman could have been your mother. Or you.

This essay is a beautiful, striking piece of non-fiction writing. It’s fascinating and visceral. Kingston faces the scary stories, the spite suicide and ill-meaning ghosts, in her past, reminding us that we, too, may have scary stories behind us.

No Name Woman

When considering the best essayists from across the Atlantic, a number of names come to mind. David Sedaris and Gore Vidal (amongst others) might appear but, for me, the king will always be David Foster Wallace. Author of three novels (The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, posthumously), he also wrote a great deal of non-fiction. He covered an incredible range of topics, from the beauty of watching Federer play tennis, to the ‘special effects pornography’ of Terminator 2, to my personal favourite: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which was first written for Harpers, and then published in the collection of the same name. For me, it’s one of the finest pieces of non-fiction.

“I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”

This, the opening of A Supposedly Fun Thing… demonstrates perfectly what made him a great writer, and more than that (since it is not just great writing we celebrate here), what made him a fantastic non-fiction writer. In that one paragraph you have his incredible, mathematical mind, his attention to odd details, and his sense of humour. At his funeral, his close friend Jonathan Franzen perhaps put it best: “At the most microscopic level: Dave Wallace was as passionate and precise a punctuator of prose as has ever walked this earth.” But Franzen probably put it better when he said, “Dave nailed it like nobody else ever had.”

I would go further than that. David Foster Wallace nailed it not just like nobody else ever had, but also like nobody else since has matched. His obsession with language and the ways we use words is unmatched. He sat on the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary and compiled lists and lists of words and their meanings. You can find a collection of these words in his final essay collection, Both Flesh and Not (named after his rather apt description of Roger Federer).

In his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007 he outlined his love of non-fiction:  He describes non-fiction as, “what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets” or the “near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake.” He celebrated the qualities of “clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity and the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates.” And he looked at how pieces “handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context and perspective.”

It’s that tsunami that Wallace navigates wonderfully; his work is packed so full of detail, fact and intricacies that sometimes it can seem like a vast sea. But Wallace is a perfect guide. Zadie Smith described his work as “difficult gifts.” That seems about right.

David Foster Wallace Essays, online at The Electric Typewriter

Daniel Carpenter is the co-founder of Bad Language and New Writing editor for the Blank Media Collective. He has been published on the Rainy City Stories and Metazen websites, as well as in the National Flash Fiction Day anthology alongside Ian Rankin and Ali Smith.

My wife has been ill.

This essay was supposed to be finished days ago but my wife has been ill. I have spent more time with the baby. Babies prefer monkeys that rattle to essays about Nonfiction heavyweights. Progress has been slow.

Without Gay Talese, it is arguable that I couldn’t have started this piece as I did. One of the very first journalists to bring the reporter into the story, his writing for Esquire magazine was as much about the finding of the story as the telling. He changed forever the balance between interviewer and interviewee. His 1966 article, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold*, shows this style in extremis, he never actually speaks to Sinatra during the article. The essay is almost travel writing, with the strange trappings of fame and Sinatra’s near universal visibility the foreign land explored, the moment of Talese’s visit carefully chosen to best show his subject’s vulnerability. Fame after all is merely a metaphor for mortality; the star, the writer, the writing, we all share that.

After Talese the writer could never be invisible again, or maybe they could. I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter. It sounds good anyway. I’m not really qualified to tell you how big an impact his work had on journalism. For a start I haven’t slept that well in three months, what with the baby, but more importantly I am always a bit wary of Big Bold Claims about people being the first to do something. One of you will know about somebody who wrote something at some point that changed everything for everybody two months before Talese was born. Fine. He is a big cheese in New Journalism. That’s enough for me. That should be enough for anybody.

Really, I’m not joking about needing to sleep. I can tell you why I love his writing. Is that enough? It is going to have to be. Sorry.

I love his prose, I love that he writes about people not just when they are at the peak of their careers but also later, often much later, and I love that he wrote brilliant nonfiction pieces about sport and about athletes. I love that he wrote about Joe Louis, not as heavyweight champion of the world but:

“at a time when he weighs 240 pounds, is going bald, is somewhat less than prosperous, and no longer possesses the quick reflexes either to hit or pick up checks.”

Talese began his writing career as a sports reporter and the subject has never lost its appeal for him (Talese is 81 and still writing). Sport, he has said, “is about people who lose and lose and lose.” For Talese it is the life, as well as the career, of the athlete that should interest us. This can be seen as an opposite stance to a postmodernist one that sees the text (in this case the sporting event) as being separate from the life – but all writers know that that separation is false.

Many of you will not be happy at my referring to a sporting event as a text. In Britain we are wary of writing about sport. Here, writing is high culture, sport is low culture. It is no surprise then that Talese’s essays about DiMaggio, Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson are not very well known here. Americans recognise that sport is a mirror to society and a part of a country’s culture, not beneath it. They also make better sandwiches than us, but that is a different story. Sport is built on dreams and dreams are what have fuelled America’s progress. Sandwiches are built on bread that isn’t sliced in a factory, but that is a different story. I can’t dwell on sandwiches. I really can’t. I need to finish this. I need to go to bed.

But would it kill people to put a pickle on the side? Really? Actually kill them?

Go to a book shop, or that there internet site (you know the one) and buy a copy of Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese. Read about fame and sport and fading brilliance. Learn to embrace sport or, at the very least, great prose about sport. Demand a better sandwich. Come and do some babysitting for me.

My wife has been unwell.

Benjamin Judge is a Manchester based writer. You can read some of his fiction at Very Short Stories about Very Good Writers, some of his nonfiction at The Complete Everything, and some of his postcards to David Cameron at Postcards to David.

*The illustration is a detail from the diagram Talese wrote for the working outline of the essay Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, on a piece of shirtboard. We found it over here.

Picking up my copy of The Best American Essays of the Century (edited by Joyce Carol Oates - gah! She’s on Twitter!) is a risky endeavor; I can spend at least an hour flipping through, waiting for a first or last line to grab me. I’ll re-read a good essay four or five times, flipping to the first page as soon as I’ve finished the last. A good essay is a magic trick with a twist: you want to know how it works. With a magic trick, once you figure it out, you’re bored by it. But with an essay, a really good essay, the twist is this: once you figure it out, it’s even more fascinating.

William H. Gass’s The Doomed In Their Sinking is a masterpiece of the form. Gass begins with a reference that not many will know; he’s speaking, it seems, to a select group of people… people who will understand him.

“Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back.”

Immediately, with no explanation of that enigmatic opening, he pictures his mother, in a particularly undignified attitude, wetting herself. Extraneous, internet-based research informs us that his mother was an alcoholic, in and out of nursing homes and asylums, “living the long death.” His father, a racist abusive.

It takes some time to realize the author’s intention in this essay. You’re nearly 500 words in before he mentions suicide, and even then, suicide only comes up as a counterpoint to the kind of death his mother insisted on, the kind that “inflicts your dying on those you are blaming for it.”

But have no doubt. In this essay, Gass means to look hard and very close at what is called suicide… and what suicide might really be. If it is, in fact, anything at all.

“Should a suicide be regarded as the last stage of series of small acts against the self?” he asks, wondering if alcoholism could be included in the definition, much like Vonnegut famously described smoking as the only honourable and classy way to commit suicide.

And suddenly, you’re off. Gass flicks his wand and barrages you with a list of suicides, descriptions, references, some obscure, some notorious: “Plath with pills, or Craine or Woolf with water, Plath again by gas, or Berryman from a bridge.”

Gass has only just gotten started. From wondering exactly what sort of act is encompassed by the word ‘suicide’ (Slashing your wrists, of course. But hunger strike? Or allowing yourself to fall asleep at the wheel?), the essay shifts to society’s perception of suicides, to wondering what a suicidal person truly desires, to a small-scale review of the literature on suicide. He considers varying types of suicides and notes the role of social class and theatricality.

He concludes that if a suicidal person wishes their suicide to be recognized as a suicide by those who remain, that person will need to make their intents very clear indeed.

But then, again, Gass taps his kerchief-covered tophat with a wand. He argues that trying to understand suicides as a group makes no sense. “The word confers a fictitious unity upon a rabble of factors, and the ironic thing about suicide itself, intrinsically considered, is that it is a wholly empty act.”

That any suicide who imagines their final act to hold any meaning is regretfully mistaken.

And here, Gass unleashes some of the sharpest, most unsentimental thought about suicides I’ve ever read: “Of course, acts aren’t language, and there’s no poetry at all in suicide, only in some accounts of it… Death will not fill up an empty life and in a line of verse it occupies only five letters of space.” Or, if your life is so hollow that you choose to end it, the ending of it won’t make your life matter very much. And the words that describe suicides, the words that analyse them are what give them meaning to those of who remain alive.

We get to decide what the suicide means.

He then executes another balletic turn, to the value and purpose of art and poetry and writing, which simply must be read to be appreciated. It’s stunning. It’s nearly impossible. It’s magic. 

Throughout this essay, Gass keeps fine-tuned balance between cruel, painfully cold thinking and heart-rending personal storytelling. I think maybe he’s so harsh because he’s punishing himself, in a way. And it hurts.

The Doomed In Their Sinking 

I saw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was teenager. It pretty much put me off reading anything by Hunter S. Thompson for about a decade. It’s not a bad film, but it was heavy on drug abuse and light on, well, everything else.

Then Fear and Loathing was voted one of the 25 Best Magazine Articles Ever by a bunch of journalists, along with one of Thompson’s other essays, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved. The vote was organised by former Wired editor Kevin Kelly, and the list of nominations is one of the best collections of classic journalism on the internet.

Reading The Kentucky Derby, I realised that Thompson had plenty of interesting things to say about the idiosyncrasies of American culture, that he really knew how to put a sentence together, and that he was far more than just a crazed maverick.

His strange blend of revolutionary politics is most identifiable in his earlier work. His 1965 Nation article The Motorcycle Gangs is great, a comparatively straightforward indictment of the American moral majority; this was the article that became The Hell’s Angels, the book that launched his career). The same disdain for the hypocrisy of the ‘square’ world runs through his 1968 Times Magazine article about the decline of hippy culture. This essay summed up the sad trajectory of the later ‘cultural revolution’ just as most people were becoming aware of its existence. And his 1970 article about the death of journalist Rubén Salazar is equally prescient, still offering remarkable insights about racial politics in California over 40 years after it was published.

What surprised me when I finally read Fear and Loathing was the bleak picture it paints of American culture, just as the country reached the height of its power. Of course Thompson’s drug-fuelled ego trip is also at the centre of the story, but he manages to convincingly present it is as a reasonable reaction to the madness of the world he finds himself in. The same sort of tension plays out beautifully in Freak Power in the Rockies, the story of his defeated attempt to take power, with a ramshackle band of drop outs and misfits, from Aspen’s political establishment.

This was Thompson at the peak of his powers. Later, he got a little too comfortable in the gonzo persona he’d created. Thompson’s once-refreshing stance had become a shtick. Although they are still very entertaining reads, wacked-out adventures like The Curse of Lono and Doomed Love at the Taco Stand don’t go as deep as his earlier work.

That said, one of my very favourite Thompson essays, Song of the Sausage Creature, has no deeper meaning at all; it’s just about enjoying the ride. I love it because it’s great writing: the prose is electric, and once it has you, it just won’t let you go. Whatever you think of his personality, there aren’t many writers who do that as well as Hunter S. Thompson.

The essays mentioned in this post can be found at The Electric Typewriter, but the bulk of his writing is only available in print. If you like what you’ve read so far, I strongly recommend you get hold of The Great Shark Hunt and Kingdom of Fear, which include the best of his journalism and more personal writings.

Submit your own Ninja of Nonfiction! Tell us about an author you’d like to review: info@openstories.org

At the tender age of 22, Joan Didion won a Vogue essay contest. It was 1956, decades before the advent of reality-based meritocratic TV job competitions that are so familiar to us today. Nevertheless, her prize was a job at the magazine, and a cross-country move, from her home state of California to New York. During her years in NY, she met the man who would be her husband for 4 decades, and she eventually moved back to California with him. She had a job in New York, writing for Vogue before she graduated from university. With her first collection of nonfiction essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she became a star of New Journalism, the subjective style that started in 1973 and changed nonfiction writing forever.

And if that was all you knew of Didion, if you have never read her essays or memoirs, you would think she had a charmed life.

But in her nonfiction, her essays and memoirs, you meet a woman much more ordinary, a person who struggles with worry and self-doubt, enough to know what it means when you’re up all night, wincing through memories of the times you’ve done wrong. In her stark and severe essay On Self Respect, she strides (rather than wanders) through embarrassment and cowardice to one of the clearest statements regarding human society I’ve ever read: “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who are, after all, deceived easily enough…”

This sort of sharp clarity especially marks Didion’s early essays. In Marrying Absurd, an 1967 essay about the Las Vegas wedding industry, her writing draws us quickly into the frankly bizarre situation that is Las Vegas. There is no rambling about with her. She is in Las Vegas, where there is no sense of time and “… neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks ‘STARDUST’ or ‘CAESAR’S PALACE.’ Yes, but what does that explain?” Her style is so immediate. When I read this sentence, I am on the highway with her. I am exasperated with her.

And the clarity of her writing only accentuates her deep, critical analysis. Didion is a tough thinker. When I first read The Women’s Movement, her eviscerating less-than-five-page dismantling of all second-wave feminism, I was maybe 23 years old. I knew something was wrong with feminism when it seemed to be so trivial. Whether or not a woman changed her surname and how many times she had to do the washing up per week never piqued my interest. In this essay, Didion breaks down the problem of second-wave with sarcasm so sour, it stings.

Her most recent memoirs sting, too, but in an entirely different way. The Year of Magical Thinking is about the year Didion spent mourning her husband and taking care of her daughter through a life-threatening illness. Joan Didion’s ability to stare unflinching at the hardest, most terrifying parts of life, is what makes her writing so important. No one else does quite what she does. And she thinks hard. And through reading her work, you can tell that didn’t come easy. To think she’s had a charmed life is to be what she never is: a soft, unclear thinker.

Joan Didion’s books and essay collections are available just about everywhere. The essays mentioned in this article can all be found on this fantastic website, which is quickly becoming a favourite haunt of mine.

Shakespeare’s Wife isn’t amazing just because it’s true or easy to read or riveting, though it is all of those. Fabulously well-researched and armed with the power to doubt, Germaine Greer sets out with one arched eyebrow to question everything that has previously been surmised about Shakespeare’s marriage.

The fact is that we have no idea what Shakespeare’s private life was like, what he thought of his wife, how much of his work was imaginative fiction, how much was based on the truth and how much of it was obsequious nonsense, written only to maintain patronages. But where prior Shakespeare scholars assume a poem or letter’s meaning to be one thing, Germaine Greer assumes it means another. She states that because we really know nothing, prior Shakespeare scholars could be wrong, and she also openly acknowledges that because we really don’t know anything, everything she posits could be wrong, too.

Shakespeare scholars have spent centuries arguing that Anne Hathaway, being 8 years older than dear Will, ensnared him by forcing her wild libido upon him and getting pregnant, thereby forcing him to marry her. However, Greer pores over birth registers from the 1500′s and finds that illegitimate birth was ridiculously common, and plenty of “good women” ended up having bastard children. In fact, leaving Anne to maintain herself and her baby wouldn’t have been impossible. Greer follows every assumption made by “Bardolaters” about Anne in this way. They claim she was useless; Greer finds evidence that many of Anne’s contemporaries could make malt, sew, knit, milk ewes, make cheese, ale, bread, cream, bacon, cloth, woven goods, and that many of Anne’s friends and neighbours were even money-lenders, making 10 per cent annually on their investments. Greer recognises that Anne’s neighbours’ success doesn’t mean Anne had the same success. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t, either. There’s just not much evidence either way. Shakespeare’s Wife occasionally shows that more evidence exists to imagine Anne was independent (or helpful, or literate…) than not, but it also shows that there is not any definite conclusive evidence.

In a way, prior Shakespeare scholars have imagined their hero to have been a genius boy, tormented by a cruel old wife, driven to prostitutes by a cold ugly wife; they have imagined Anne to be a conniving woman who, once she’d had her way with dear Will (enough to have twins and another child with him), ended up leading a miserable solitary life. They imagine her entire life after Will was spent in dire poverty, illiterate, unable even to make any sort of use of herself, unaware and unimpressed by her husband’s work. They often aim to prove Will’s poor behaviour toward his wife is justified by her inelegance, her ugliness, and her general repugnance. Greer proves this story of Anne’s life to be pure imagination. And then imagines something else entirely.

She essentially un-interprets the documents that previous scholars have interpreted to Anne’s detriment. Shakespeare’s will has been interpreted to mean that Will intentionally left Anne from his will because he hated her. Greer argues that there are a large number of possessions that aren’t mentioned in Will’s will, because many things already given would not need mentioning. Importantly missing: his papers. He does bequeath her the bed, and scholars have often said this is a scathing, mean-spirited comment on Anne’s infidelity. Greer shows that beds were often bequeathed back then, because they were the most expensive piece of furniture in the house. Also, beds often couldn’t be moved, so bequeathing a bed also usually meant the beneficiary couldn’t be kicked out of their house. None of this proves Shakespeare did like his wife. It only proves that he might have.

In this way, through careful research and painstaking reinterpretation, Greer imagines for Anne a better life, a life of solid caring and simple honest living. At the end of the book, Greer states her entire book is “probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice.” After all, we don’t have proof either way, and this is why the limited information offered to history is infuriating. But she’s offered Anne a marriage more like the ones her husband famously wrote about; a marriage where the wife is true to her husband and duties, even if the husband doesn’t behave nearly so well.

What I found really brilliant about this analysis was how Greer clarifies the role that wives of public men are written into by “experts.” She examines how the wives of men who are successful and well-liked are often painted as conniving and unloving. Think Hilary. The wives of the men we admire can never be worth sharing their beds. When Bill was in office, Hilary was painted as a careering woman; their marriage is regularly presented as the picture of marital strife. But she stayed with him and stood by him through an impeachment over an incident wherein Bill humiliated and betrayed her. The judgment of her behaviour as the wife of a powerful man plainly shows how successful men are simply held to a different and lower standard.

Shakespeare’s Wife, by Germaine Greer
First published 2007

The other night, I was out with a friend who, like me, loves Beyoncé. We were engaged in an discussion that has taken place amongst women ever since the Queen of Fierce first went solo: Is Beyoncé a feminist?

I argued no, not really. Or not very much of one.
My friend argued yes, yes, of course.

She strips her clothes off regularly, I said. In an article about how powerful a businesswoman she is, surely, she doesn’t need to get her kit off.

Feminism is about choice, my friend said. She can choose to be naked if she wants.

Is that really a choice for her? I asked.

Nora Ephron’s On Never Having Been A Prom Queen*, finds Ephron dealing with these exact same questions. What counts as a feminist? What exactly is feminism about, at its core? With insight and honesty, and stunningly clear language, Ephron begins with annoyance at a friend who’s worrying about aging, and meanders into a consideration of all the ways women are divided. Beauty is a division that Ephron ponders often. From the small divisions between women who wear make-up and those who don’t, she takes us straight into the big divisions that continually keep the women’s movement wasting time and wondering if someone is or isn’t a feminist.

Ephron might be better known as a film writer and director, and while she might have changed film history forever, practically inventing romantic comedies single-handedly, I love her for her essays. Strong, personal, funny insights that somehow vocalize everything you’ve only vaguely thought about.

Ephron, as an essayist, allows her essays to be exactly what they are meant to be—an attempt to understand something, a try, a jab of the spear into the incomprehensible. She ends certain that she’s being unfair to women on the other side of her divides. And with uncertainty on how to accept other women’s rights to make the choices that she wouldn’t.

Over 40 years after Ephron’s essay was first published, my friend and I pondered whether a beautiful millionaire is a feminist because she chooses to be sexualised, or not one because she’s making the wrong choice. We’re still uncertain. Nora Ephron’s essays show her thinking through problems with sophistication, curiosity, and honesty. The fact that her problems are our problems makes her writing a source of wisdom, even if she really doesn’t offer us any certainty—apart from assuring us we are not wrong in being uncertain, too.

*On Never Having Been A Prom Queen is available in Crazy Salad & Scribble Scribble, a collection of Ephron’s essays.

A writing teacher introduced me to Quammen by handing me an essay entitled, Synecdoche and the Trout. It’s a personal essay, wordy and deliberate. I wanted to know more about how David Quammen writes, and honestly, I just wanted to enjoy more of his writing.

Since then, I’ve read David Quammen’s Wild Thoughts from Wild Places several times. A collection of essays written over a number of years, I always find that different pieces pique my interest on different readings. But there is one that makes me go still every time I read it: The Swallow that Hibernates Underwater.

The essay is about Gilbert White, a British naturalist who spent nearly his entire life in his home village of Selborne, at a time when British naturalists were travelling the world, discovering new species, and generally, being Carl Linnaeus.

Gilbert White fascinates Quammen. He, too, is a science writer, an excellent one, and like Quammen, he also seems to have been a gentle man, who loved watching birds and writing about their habits.

Quammen begins the essay with a meditation on the deals we all make with life. We “keep faith with our commitments, sow oats in a high wind, marry often, travel great distances in search of a place to call home, lose big, win big, harbor regrets, fulfill finally our one wildest dream; or, alternatively, we don’t.” Throughout the essay, Quammen not only tells us about Gilbert’s work and about the agility of swallows, but also, more importantly, about his life, and the deal White made with life.

What makes David Quammen a superb science writer is his empathy, even with people he dislikes, and his enduring commitment to the human stories that take place alongside those of pigeons, mountain lions, trout and synecdoche.

David Quammen is on Twitter. And for more of his work, I can suggest no better introduction than Wild Thoughts from Wild Places.

Mitchell was a man of particular habits who liked to wander around the city looking for wildflowers and making lists, poking his nose into its older corners, befriending strangers and digging out stories. There is a certain kind of piece that he went a fair way towards inventing, and it always involves a man out for a walk, amiable and endlessly interested. He had a fascination with the odd subcultures that inhabited New York: a community of freed slaves turned oystermen on Staten Island, an enclave of high-steel working Mohawk Indians in Brooklyn, a dying Shad fishing town across the Hudson in New Jersey. He let us see the ghosts of communities and industries fading into history as new ones spring up around them, the many cities that overlap and co-exist on the same ground.

I love him for personal reasons. He was intent on capturing a rollicking old town disappearing in the rearview mirror even as he wrote about it, a place full of Tammany beefsteaks, steamboat hotels, eccentric characters and gas-lit bars full of rummies. He had the same nostalgia for that time I have for his New York of the forties and fifties, a time distant but dear, strange and familiar at once. In his work I can see glimpses of the tenement city awaiting my six year old grandmother, fresh off the boat from Poland, who would who would grow up to change her name from Chana to Alice, or hear the rhythms of the workaday Manhattan of the grandfather I never met, a garment industry union lawyer who liked to read science fiction.

Though not as well known in the UK, in the USA Mitchell is regarded with all the reverence due a 20^th Century Journalism God. No one ever really talks about something so pedestrian as his reporting technique, and the challenges posed by all the long quotes, sometimes going on for a page or more, that are a hallmark of his work. I can’t really see him there with a pen and notebook. With the oystermen and volunteer graveyard keepers he befriended, that would queer his pitch. This piece from William Zinsser is interesting.

In one series of pieces, Old Mr. Flood,  Mitchell admits to “rounding the corners” – creating composite characters and condensing quotes – putting this work alone firmly in the camp of what we now call creative nonfiction. ” I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts,” he wrote.  But held up against some of the sloppy  exhibitionism currently being peddled under the name creative nonfiction, it doesn’t seem right for Mitchell. I don’t know if it’s possible to write his way anymore. In fact, I kind of hope it isn’t.

- Kate Feld

Ninjas of Nonfiction is a new series of posts about great nonfiction writers. Want to write one? Email The Real Story at info@openstories.org.