Reportage literature

This work of creative nonfiction is meant to explore the effects of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder in American war veterans and their families. As a work of blended literary journalism and memoir, the author interviewed afflicted veterans from World War II to the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars, included scholarly research, and reflected on how her father's dealings with the disorder have affected her family.

In the American creative nonfiction genre, the line between fact and fiction is ever-blurring. Two novels which strive for realness and are thematically related in their focus on a cause célèbre and the death penalty, Truman Capote's In cold blood and Norman Mailer's The executioner's song, offer clues that might help approach the question of what makes a specific work fall under the category of creative nonfiction. I analyze the creative techniques that the authors use in their novels, and I consider details from the texts about the activeness and reliability of the narrators in the two books, as well as consequent political implications. Additionally, I ground my examination of these novels in a discussion of the progress from the early novel's drive for realism to twentieth-century literary journalism.