Writing: Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction

Lecture – A survey of criticism, reportage, polemics, memoirs, and meditations from the 1920s to the present that explores the variety and flexibility of nonfiction styles and genres.

Readings will include:


Edmund Wilson: selections from The Edmund Wilson Reader

Virginia Woolf: selections from The Common Reader: First Series and A Room of One's Own

George Orwell: selections from Essays by George Orwell and Homage to Catalonia

Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz

Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory

E.B. White: selections from Essays of E.B. White 

Joseph Mitchell: selections from Up in the Old Hotel

Joan Didion: selections from We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Norman Mailer: The Armies of the Night

V.S. Naipaul: "Prologue to an Autobiography" in Literary Occasions.

See the Writing MFA Program page for all course information and requirements.