Creative Nonfiction

What is “creative nonfiction,” exactly? Isn’t the term an oxymoron? Creative writers—playwrights, poets, novelists—are people who make stuff up. Which means that the basic definition of “nonfiction writer” is a writer who doesn’t make stuff up, or is not supposed to make stuff up. If nonfiction writers are “creative” in the sense that poets and novelists are creative, if what they write is partly make-believe, are they still writing nonfiction? [...]

One answer is suggested by Samuel W. Franklin’s provocative new book, “The Cult of Creativity” (Chicago). Franklin thinks that “creativity” is a concept invented in Cold War America—that is, in the twenty or so years after 1945. Before that, he says, the term barely existed. “Create” and “creation,” of course, are old words (not to mention, as Franklin, oddly, does not, “Creator” and “Creation”). But “creativity,” as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon. Louis Menand, The New Yorker