Non-fiction novel

The non-fiction novel is a literary genre that, broadly speaking, depicts non-fictional elements, such as real historical figures and actual events, woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the slang term "faction", a portmanteau of the words fact and fiction. The genre goes back at least as far as André Breton's Nadja (1928) and several books by the Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval, such as Ulice Git-le-coeur (1936). One of the early English books in the genre is Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). Jim Bishop's The Glass Crutch (1945) was advertised as "one of the most unusual best-sellers ever published—a non-fiction novel." Perhaps the most influential nonfiction novel of the twentieth century was John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946). Scholar David Schmid writes that "many American writers during the post-World War II period, including Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, [chose] to follow Hersey’s lead." In The New York Times, Herbert Mitgang referred to Paul Goodman's Making Do (1963) as falling into "the category [that] is that growing one which might be called the nonfiction novel." The next year, he applied the term to Leon Uris's Armageddon (1964). Early influences on the genre can be traced to books such as Ka-tzetnik 135633's (Yehiel Dinur) novellas Salamdra (1946) and House of Dolls (1953), Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946), and John Dos Passos's USA trilogy (1930–36). House of Dolls describes the journey of the young Daniella Parleshnik during the Holocaust, as she becomes part of the "Joy Division," a Nazi system keeping Jewish women as sex slaves in concentration camps. The book's plot was inspired by the Dinur's experience from the Holocaust and his younger sister, who did not survive the Holocaust. Works of history or biography have often used the narrative devices of fiction to depict real-world events.