Fact vs Fiction: Journalism and American Modernism

Abstract Journalism offered an apprenticeship to many established American novelists from the post-Civil war period to pre-World War II. Many of them engaged in different kinds of journalism, but most of them wrote articles for newspapers by filling factual gaps with fiction. In exchange, they employed conventions drawn from journalism in their fiction writing. The paper focuses on two of these canonical writers: Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos to discuss how journalism was used to keep them in a direct dialogue with contemporary issues and with the innovative techniques of the new media. This interplay between their fiction writing and journalism contributed to a redefinition of American modernism.