"I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority"
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The line has the quiet sting of a self-correction. Matthiessen is admitting that he once treated genre as a moral ladder: fiction as the glamorous, “serious” art and nonfiction as the dutiful record, or vice versa. Either way, the old distinction is a hierarchy disguised as taste. His phrasing matters: he didn’t simply separate the two; he ranked them. That’s a confession of vanity, but also of an inherited literary prejudice that says imagination is either the highest calling or the original sin, depending on which workshop or newsroom raised you.
It lands because Matthiessen’s career kept poking holes in the idea that you can cleanly divide truth from invention. As a writer who moved between novels and reporting, and who wrote nonfiction with the sensory precision of a novelist, he lived in the seam where “facts” still require shaping. The quote’s subtext is that craft is the real constant: the same attention, rhythm, and selection operate whether you’re describing a wilderness trek or building a character’s interior life. What changes is the contract with the reader, not the artistry.
In the broader context of late-20th-century American letters, it also reads like a rejection of status anxiety: the old MFA-versus-newsroom rivalry, the suspicion that nonfiction is mere documentation, the suspicion that fiction is mere fabrication. Matthiessen is signaling a mature writer’s recalibration: less scoreboard, more seriousness about how language makes meaning.
It lands because Matthiessen’s career kept poking holes in the idea that you can cleanly divide truth from invention. As a writer who moved between novels and reporting, and who wrote nonfiction with the sensory precision of a novelist, he lived in the seam where “facts” still require shaping. The quote’s subtext is that craft is the real constant: the same attention, rhythm, and selection operate whether you’re describing a wilderness trek or building a character’s interior life. What changes is the contract with the reader, not the artistry.
In the broader context of late-20th-century American letters, it also reads like a rejection of status anxiety: the old MFA-versus-newsroom rivalry, the suspicion that nonfiction is mere documentation, the suspicion that fiction is mere fabrication. Matthiessen is signaling a mature writer’s recalibration: less scoreboard, more seriousness about how language makes meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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