Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, while foremost among major American novelists, are also frequently cited as forefathers of literary journalism. Both men began their careers as journalists before moving on to fiction. Even after becoming successful novelists, however, both authors completed several works of nonfiction. Not easily defined by literary genres of their time, these books are now considered as part of the beginnings of a new literary genre. Twain and Hemingway found conventional journalism far too restrictive, yet they wanted to write about real life experiences.

Mark Twain wrote The Innocents Abroad "to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him" (Preface). Ernest Hemingway explained that Green Hills of Africa, an account of his experiences with his wife and a friend on a three-month African safari, was "not a novel but was written in an attempt to write an absolutely true book" (23). How can Twain see with eyes other than his own? And to whom will Hemingway's book be "absolutely true?" The answers to these questions form much of the foundation of literary journalism's outlook on the relationship between reader and writer.

The Innocents Abroad and Green Hills of Africa are by no means neutral accounts, meant to present a standard reality. On the contrary, the authors creatively recounted their experiences in the first person, complete with their impressions, feelings and thoughts. To write a true book meant to write it freely and to write it with regard to the subject and to the author's experience of it, rather than to a particular genre. Genres, after all, should follow writing, not the other way around. Unlike their descendants of the 1960s, Twain and Hemingway were not out to "create new genres." They simply tried to write true stories in a true way.

While standard journalism, travel-writing and other forms of nonfiction remove subjectivity to purify fact, Twain and Hemingway found that those same subjective impressions could serve to reveal experience, to bring it to life. They wanted the freedoms of language usually associated with fiction, but not to disguise their work as the product of the imagination. Though the thoughts and impressions expressed in these nonfictions may be subjective, readers know and understand them in relation to their own. Within this kind of writing there is an idea of a shared understanding among people beyond "cold, hard facts" and that this kind of human communication, which has always been part of fiction, is possible in nonfiction. Twain and Hemingway were among the first and most famous to experiment with this kind of literary nonfiction, but there are significant differences between their work and that of other literary journalists, such as Orwell and Agee as well as the New Journalists of the 1960s. Twain and Hemingway did not call their nonfiction "journalism" or relate to their subjects or their position as writers as journalists. As explorers of literary journalism, Twain and Hemingway may best be seen as having come at their nonfiction from a mostly literary perspective.

The literary ambitions of these authors are easily spotted even in their earliest journalism. Twain was known by the editors of the The San Francisco Call, where he was a reporter, as "incurably literary" (Branch, 277). In his time at the Call, around the 1860s, American journalism was a good bit wilder than it became in the twentieth century. Yet, while standards of style and detachment were far from iron-clad, Twain still strained at journalism's boundaries. He couldn't resist sharpening his reports with irony and vivid description. His style was so distinct from that of the other writers at the paper that more than a half century later scholars easily singled out Twain's unsigned reports by their level of sarcasm. The following, for example, is an excerpt from a report about a runaway horse and carriage:

This is a fairly typical example of a Twain report. Despite the fun he seem to have had with his journalism, he considered it "soulless drudgery, and almost destitute of interest" (Branch, 2). Twain was not interested in journalism's mission to provide neutral information. He was never neutral about anything. Not to say that he was partial to a particular ideology, on the contrary, he was decidedly not partial to anything. Twain applied to everything his wit and natural ability to detect bunk. In his journalism, he set this particular X-ray vision on everything from carriage accidents to politics.

Twain's thinly veiled social commentary in his reportage did not go unnoticed, and it was certainly not appreciated by everyone. The following complaint was lodged against him in 1864 by a Virginia City journalist called Meridan:

Poor Meridan. Can you imagine going down in history as the one to have reproached Mark Twain with "That's not funny!?" Nonetheless, insofar as he criticized Twain for not being a proper journalist, he was quite right. Twain was well known at his paper for deviating habitually from journalistic norms of the day and for "sacrificing fact and objectivity to the quick intuition or to the compelling emotion" (Branch, 278). Twain was "impressionistic rather than thorough, and he made the imaginative stroke for the joy of it" (278). Though he was a reporter, Twain itched to say what he thought. He was "like a frustrated editorial writer" and often "slipped his say" into his reports (5). A writer who worked with Twain as a journalist said Twain aimed at "the poetic truth, and the jocular truth...He had a clear, buoyant, original brain, and was himself" (5). This statement could apply to all of Twain's work.

In The Innocents Abroad Twain could do openly what he had been doing on the sly in his journalism. He was free to have his say and to write as he wished. Most importantly, Twain was free to express himself. In all his nonfiction, Twain sought to comment as much as to report. The Innocents Abroad contains a great deal of factual information and straight-forward description, for Twain had researched the places he visited.

However, a factual and researched account is not the overall impression of the book. The Innocents Abroad was not written with with a notebook in hand. Twain "always allowed his imagination to operate freely upon what he saw, what he read, and what he remembered" (Wagenknecht, vi). He was in search of the "poetic and jocular" truth rather than the strictly factual. For instance, in this scene the author stands on the deck please with himself for not being seasick as many of the other passengers are:

If Twain had been among the New Journalists of the 1960s, he would surely have been criticised, as many of them were, for letting the "fictionist get the upper hand on the journalist." It would have been true, except for one crucial difference between the New Journalists and Twain; he never called his work "journalism."

One reviewer of The Innocents Abroad wrote that it had "taught him nothing about the population of cities and the character of the rocks in different localities," as was common in most travel books. Instead it had provided him with a glimpse of "the realities of human life everywhere" (W.D. Howells qtd. by Connery, 1992, 7). In Twain's own terms, this was success.

Twain wrote that he wanted to suggest to readers what the far-off lands of Europe and the East would be like to see for themselves. He did so by offering a human account of the journey, but there was still more to it than that. Twain was more than a recorder. He was the eyes of the reader in that he was an American abroad and seemed to represent general American beliefs and values, which he applied unflinchingly to the foreign cultures he encountered. But Twain was the readers' conscience as well, a conscience readers might not have had otherwise. Consider the following:

Here Twain is commenting as much about America as he is about Turkey. His remark about "morals and whisky" being scarce suggests the irony of one culture criticizing another for what it sees as "moral contradictions." The Christian might incredulously declare, "Those Muslims claim it's sinful to drink, yet they are bigamists!" Yet the Muslim could likewise say "Those Christians say it's a sin to have more than one wife, yet they drink alcohol." Twain sets up a moral declaration seemingly from a typical American perspective, but then turns it around and shoots it into the face of anyone who might have been nodding. Similarly, Twain's commentary on the behavior of his fellow passengers is almost as much a part of the story as the sights. He recalls with contempt the crudity of some American tourists who "chipped fragments off monuments and trod upon an Arab's praying carpet" (Wagenknecht, xi). For example, at the ruins of Baalbec in Lebanon:

Twain's point in offering such commentary, if that is even the proper word for it, is not to promote or degrade certain ideologies or even purely for the sake of poking fun. As all commentators wish, Twain hoped to inspire introspection in his readers, to get them to reconsider their own opinions and behavior.

In his nonfiction, Twain works within a system of discourse where he is at the center. It is analogous to journalism's system of objectivity and detachment, except that its conventions are arranged with regard to how they best suit what Mark Twain wants to say about what he has seen. As in his journalism, however, Twain was not a partisan, but rather a creative and critical consciousness standing within an event and trying to make what he could of it. Twain expected criticism of his approach, and in the forward to The Innocents Abroad he wrote:

Twain is read for his particular brand of impartiality and honesty, for his personality and perspective. "His say" is generally the most interesting aspect of what he writes. In this sense, Twain is part of whatever subject he may be writing about, not only as a guide but also as a sort of performer. "He dramatized his own fascinating individuality, and his reader is ever conscious of the author's presence" (Wagenknecht, vi). Not surprisingly, Twain's penchant for adding personal and imaginative touches to his writing is precisely what got him fired from his job as a reporter at the San Francisco Call. Yet these same "incurably literary" inclinations are why Mark Twain, the writer, is immortal.

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Hemingway did not share Twain's disdain of journalism. He was intrigued by journalism and saw artistic possibilities in its plain style. Like Twain, however, he always wanted to do more with his journalism than was allowed by the conventions of the day. Practically from the day Hemingway was hired as a reporter at the Toronto Star in 1920, he strained at his reins. As in his later works of fiction, Hemingway the journalist tried to capture the "true facts" of a story, what he called the "true gen," the human essence of a story. He often worked dialogue and action into his reports to give them a dramatic dimension (Scribner, xxvi). For example, the following article about Toronto's barber college, written in 1920:

Though this is a light human interest piece, its amused tone is fairly typical of Hemingway's Star reports. "The comic element of the Toronto articles may surprise those who know only his novels and stories," but it was characteristic of much of his early journalism (Scribner, xxvi). The style is reminiscent of Ring Lardner, a well-known essayist and humorist of the 1920, whom Hemingway admired. In high school, where Hemingway wrote for his school newspaper, he was known by classmates as "our Ring Lardner" (xxv).

Hemingway's journalism also contained "a touch of punditry" (xxvi). Whenever he could, he tried to "set the record straight," and he often did so with "that voice of experience and much-traveled source of inside information" that later became know as the "Papa Hemingway" figure (xxvi). For instance, here is an excerpt from one of Hemingway's dispatches from the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1923. The by-lined article was entitled "Mussolini, Europe's Prize Bluffer."

The Fascist dictator had announced he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room. Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted in the famous frown. He was registering Dictator. Being an ex-newspaperman himself he knew how many readers would be reached by accounts the men in the room would write of the interview he was about to give. And he remained absorbed in his book. Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand papers served by the two hundred correspondents. "As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc."

Hemingway wrote so well, claimed Charles Scribner in a forward to a collection of the author's reports, "that some of his journalistic pieces can stand on an equal footing with his literary work." Hemingway, however, hated to have his reports and dispatches "mentioned in the same breath as his novels and stories" (xxvii). Journalism was fleeting, he believed. "If it was reporting," he said, "they would not remember it" (qtd. by Weber, 1990, 22).

Gertrude Stein once told Hemingway, "If you keep on doing newspaper work, you will never see things, you will only see words" (qtd. by Lynn, 197). She told him that while journalists focus on facts, writers create visions. The remark made a great impression on Hemingway, who was still in his twenties and aspired to be a writer. Later on, while employed at the Star, he commented to Sherwood Anderson, who became a mentor to Hemingway, "This goddam newspaper stuff is gradually ruining me" (173). To an extent Hemingway saw journalism in opposition to his goal of becoming a novelist. This was not because journalism dealt with reality rather than imagination, but because of how journalism dealt with reality, because its concerns were with words and facts rather than visions.

Nevertheless, whatever fears Hemingway had of journalism spoiling his creative talents, he accepted journalistic assignments throughout his career. He covered postwar Italy for The New Republic, the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, China for PM, the Royal Air Force for Collier's, and the bullfights of 1959 in Spain for Life (Scribner, xxvii).

Hemingway's first work of "extended nonfiction," as Ronald Weber called it, was Death in the Afternoon, an "exuberant, idiosyncratic nonfiction treatise on tauromachy," which began as an article for Fortune magazine (Weber, 1990, 21). Hemingway wanted book more than a "textbook history or an apologia for bullfighting, but, if possible, 'the bullfight itself'" (Baker, 145). He "went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself" (Hemingway, 1932, 3). He expected they would be "simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them," but instead found them "far from simple" (2). To reveal the true experience of the bullfight, in all its complicity, meant "to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced" (2). To "create visions" within nonfiction, Hemingway used the techniques of fiction, and this he saw in contrast to journalism.

In journalism, thought Hemingway, "the apparent urgency of the information swindles the reader into imagining it, but a month later the time element is gone and the account is forgotten" (Ashdown, 189). Hemingway did not see his nonfiction so much as in opposition to journalism as in relation to fiction. As he said of Green Hills of Africa, it was written "to see if the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination" (Preface).

This was also true of Death in the Afternoon. Though it is a history, a report, a guide, and a descriptive analysis rolled into one, "it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the initial impulse behind the book was esthetic" (Baker, 146). From the start, Hemingway went to the bullfights to write about "death." He was looking for an experience "which would give me the feeling of life and death" (Hemingway, 1932, 3).

By choosing such a universal subject and by expressing the "sequence of motion and fact" which makes emotion, Hemingway sought to give his nonfiction book on bullfighting an eternal quality. He wanted to make it relevant not just to bullfighting but to life in the way a novel can be. He wanted to express the human truth usually associated with novels in nonfiction.

Green Hills of Africa was Hemingway's second and most ambitious experiment in nonfiction. As with Death in the Afternoon, to attempt this "absolutely true" book, Hemingway employed his writer's eye and novelist's techniques to "create visions." As Carlos Baker wrote of the book:

Much more than a "landscape painting," Green Hills of Africa is a carefully structured work containing dialogue, action and a very definite perspective. This dramatic retelling of, as Hemingway put it, "that wonderful goddamned Kudu hunt --the relations between the people-- and the way it all worked up to a climax." is structured around Hemingway himself (qtd. by Weber, 1990 31). He is the "hero" of the story. Once again, to quote Baker:

On more than one occasion in Green Hills of Africa, the reader has the feeling Hemingway included and structured certain episodes so as to give himself an opening to talk about things which really have nothing to do with the overall experience of the hunt, whether it be his past and personal life or his opinions of literature. For example, at one point Hemingway meets a German with his truck broken down on the road. The introductions go:

Hemingway invites Kandisky back to his camp where the guest insists that the host discuss his views of literature:

Hemingway tells him. Kandisky says little more than "Go on." Green Hills of Africa "holds, more than any of his other works, the philosophy of the writer" (Weeks, 461), and because the interest of the book rests so heavily on Hemingway's status as a celebrity, it is as much an autobiography as it is anything else. Hemingway himself sometimes referred to Green Hills as an autobiography (Lynn, 424). But, like Twain with his nonfiction, Hemingway never referred to it as journalism.

It is not particularly surprising that Hemingway's "nonfiction novel," as it might have been called if it had been published 30 years later, was autobiographical; after all, several of his novels were quite straightforwardly based on his own experience. With regard to the "journalistic" nature of Hemingway's nonfiction, I suspect that, like Twain, he "allowed his imagination to operate freely upon what he saw, what he read, and what he remembered" (Wagenknecht, vi). Some find that "The territory of Hemingway's serious nonfiction was always the muddled area between fact and fiction" (Weber, 1990, 23), that Hemingway's sensibilities as a fictionist "impelled him to invent, organize reality into aesthetic patterns, cultivate the 'impressionism'" (Burgess qtd. by Ashdown, 192).

Hemingway set out to write Green Hills of Africa as an "absolutely true" book, and compared to a novel, which is what he compared the work to, it was. Whatever didn't actually happen, Hemingway included because it was true to the story, and, after all, it was Hemingway's story. He never professed to "reveal" anything other than his hunt, "to show what it was like to someone who knew nothing about it" (1935, Preface).

Hemingway's nonfiction is generally looked down upon by literary critics in comparison to his fiction. Most often disparaged is Hemingway's presence in the work as himself. Critic Edmund Wilson, for instance, called Hemingway's persona in his nonfiction "dominating,...prickly and ironic, occasionally hectoring and long-winded" (qtd. by Weber, 1990, 25). In assessing the "history" of the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe acknowledged Hemingway's contribution to the genre only as "some (but not much)" of his "'reportage'" from the 1930s, and did not even mention his longer works of nonfiction (1973, 45). Herbert Gold, while arguing that New Journalism was not new, wrote, "It's only the celebrity-mongering, the offering of the self for sale by flashy wordsmithing selfs that seems very modern. (Hemingway's decline was the last generation's sad example)" (295). This apparent disdain for the famous novelist's nonfiction is, of course, far from a universally held opinion. Ronald Weber wrote:

The dispute over Hemingway's presence in his work as himself represents something fundamental about a personal narrative in which the author himself is as much the subject of the story as whatever events or experiences the story is based upon or framed by. Whether the reader likes the story or not goes beyond the quality of the writing and the interest of the subject to include the personality of the writer. If you are not intrigued by the writer as a person, chances are you're not going to be interested his autobiographical narrative. Like most people with strong personalities, Hemingway is disliked at least as often as liked.

Twain and Hemingway are rightly considered as in the roots of literary journalism's family tree. Their primary contributions to the genre were the recognition of and experimentation with a different way of telling a story, a way that could not be described by existing genres and shared the attributes of creative writing and journalism. Twain and Hemingway recognized that to tell a true story did not necessarily mean reducing it to verifiable facts or fictionalizing it. Their work also established that subjectivity in nonfiction can serve to reveal the subject in a way that was most commonly left to the poet or novelist. Nevertheless, it seems clear that with regard to literary journalism, Twain and Hemingway came from the literary side of the family. Their touchstone was the novel, and their sensibilities as writers resided with fiction.