We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another.
In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't?
Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.
.png "Two writers, two very different personalities and the problem with pretending the journalist isn't there")
Mailer was loud, combative, theatrical and seemingly incapable of entering a room without eventually becoming one of the principal subjects under discussion. He ran for mayor of New York. He got into fights. He appeared on television and argued with people. He wrote about politics, war, sex, boxing and himself, frequently managing to combine several of these subjects at once. Norman Mailer didn't simply have a public persona. At times, Norman Mailer appeared to be the principal character in the ongoing Norman Mailer production. He was always the main character.
Didion was something else entirely. Small, watchful, controlled. Dark glasses, cigarette, notebook. She cultivated the impression of somebody sitting quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else made the potentially catastrophic mistake of forgetting she was there.
In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith.
Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.
So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?
Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.
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War novels, at their best, are not just about battlefields, but about the people who move through them, the memories they shoulder, and the hope that flickers even in the darkest hours.
Here are twenty novels, not only from World War II, but also from other conflicts, that shine a light and tell stories about conflict, compassion, and endurance. Each comes with a quote—a shard of truth, if you like—and a reason to read.
It is so evocative, and carries such weight. It's more than a slogan — it signals ambition, scope, and the desire to say something profound about the American experience. But what exactly is it? Where did the term come from? Why do writers still chase it and why are we still talking about it.
It makes me very happy to have these bookshelves. I now need to start organising my bookshelves into an actual system.