Who Are the Great Nonfiction Writers Now?
Suggestions, please! My evolving list of essayists, journalists, memoir writers, and book authors
Recently, I stayed with good friends in Oakland, California, who are documentary filmmakers. As we lingered over dinner one night, they challenged me with a question: Which contemporary nonfiction writers are the equivalent of the New Journalists — icons such as Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, or Joan Didion?
And: Is anybody writing now who can possibly match them in terms of influence on future writers and a lasting cultural footprint? (I’d add James Baldwin, too.)
A gauntlet was thrown, one that got me thinking hard about what it means to be a “great” nonfiction writer. I’m not sure the traditional conception of greatness has value, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
Here’s what I do know: I’ve seen a blossoming of nonfiction writing in the past three decades, much of it involving personal expression in literary essays and journalistic features. I love this kind of writing. My textbook, First-Person Journalism (Routledge, 2022) offers many excellent examples as well as an examination of the craft.
Still, when those friends first posed the question, I was momentarily stymied. How could I name only one or two writers? There are so many! We tossed around a few names, but I was dissatisfied. Later, I recalled David Foster Wallace referring to nonfiction as “Total Noise.” In a piece in the 2007 Best American Essays, he distinguishes between the feeling of writing nonfiction and fiction like so:
“[T]he truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses — it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.”
Which, like so much of this particular icon’s writing, clarifies little for me.
The next day, I extended the first conversation by talking with two other bookish friends in Oakland. One told me, with a little smile, “I don’t like Joan Didion.” He knew that would get my goat, except not really. He and I share a love for the travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon, whose 1997 No Mercy — a saga about searching for a lost dinosaur in the Congo — is one of my all-time favorite weird nonfiction narratives.
Mentioning O’Hanlon brought to mind Helen Garner (of course! the Joan Didion of Australia!), Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, Margaret Renkl, and. . .
And I realized then why the question generates so many answers. The best nonfiction writers are beset by the “noise” in highly subjective ways, but so are their readers. The writers you resonate with depend on the topics that interest you at the time you encounter an author or a given work (mushrooms? AI? animal perception? the history of the Ottoman empire?). I’ll testify that my interests change like the wind when I’m traveling or the news drops or with the passage of time or simply because I’m curious.
Those conversations about nonfiction kept winding back with various friends, until I realized something else: I had been keeping a list of nonfiction authors and first-person journalists. I began compiling it as part of the additional materials provided with various AWP Conference panels I’ve organized.1
This led me to create my updated Great Nonfiction Reading List, something you’re welcome to check out via the link or the button above. It’s now an evolving Google doc that also includes student suggestions from my first-person journalism and feature-writing courses at Harvard Extension. I keep adding new entries as well, based on my recent reading and (perhaps) suggestions from other friends like you.
As for what being a “great” writer means in a diverse world, I’d rather imagine a gigantic bouquet of wonder, joy, sorrow, and illumination. When I consider the many, many great literary writers and journalists on my list — and the many I don’t yet know about — I feel closest to hope.
The best nonfiction involves astute observation of the world. It allows readers in, revealing experiences we may connect with or have never encountered before. We relate or argue back. We engage. I hope the bookish conversation continues here, starting with your comments about nonfiction authors who stand out for you, on Substack or elsewhere. Add a comment or email me with your suggestions.
Here’s Leslie Jamison — she’s on my list — in a recent piece in the New Yorker, “The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage”:
“In class, I spoke to my students about breaking open the anecdotal stories we all told about ourselves and others about our lives. You have to uproot the cocktail-party story, I said, in order to get at the more complicated version lurking beneath it: the nostalgia under the anger, the fear beneath the ambition. I didn’t want their breakups summarized, I wanted specifics. . . .”2
The quality of an individual voice carries nonfiction, but voice is based on the details you notice, and every day includes a zillion specifics or “noise.”
I’m writing this on the edge of a vineyard in the Napa Valley, one owned by a friend’s family for decades (now contracted out to other growers). The power has been out during most of my stay after a big windstorm; it was 32 degrees outside when I woke up this morning. I’m bundled in a fleece blanket, fingers puckered with cold, typing. Yellow mustard blooms amid acres of fallow vines. Frogs croak every evening from muddy puddles and creeks. The constellation of Orion blazed in a clear sky last night.
Whatever we notice, whatever we read, may we all be astute observers of our own lives and the big, noisy world around us.
I’m not attending this year’s AWP Conference in Kansas City, but I like the synchronicity, the nod to collective effort on the part of past panelists and myself to name the writers we read and care about. Titles for those past panels include: “First-Person Journalism” (AWP 2022), “How to Talk About Yourself in Nonfiction” (AWP 2019), “What Journalists Can Teach Literary Writers” (AWP 2017), and “The New Nonfiction” (AWP 2016).
Jamison’s piece is titled “A New Life” in the January 22, 2024, print edition of the New Yorker. While I understand the need for the hooks in the digital title, “A New Life” evokes a more layered understanding of personal experience and change.
Who are your favorite nonfiction writers? I'd love to hear your suggestions...
Edmund Wilson has been a great inspiration for me. He lived through a vibrant era in history and popular culture and captured much of it with his unique voice.