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Artful Falsehoods and the Constraints of the Journalist’s Life

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The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction
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Abstract

Dorothy Parker is remembered as one of the great journalist-literary hangers-on—a tart-tongued member of the famed Algonquin Hotel Roundtable, a fan who worshipped Ernest Hemingway and pursued him with the ardor of a groupie, and a magazine journalist, short story writer, and playwright whose literary accomplishments never quite matched the renown attached to her legendary persona. But, in one important sense, she shared a key experience with a number of other famous journalist-literary figures: she paid a high price for her insistence that her integrity as a writer takes precedent over the compromises of conscience that journalism sometimes requires.

I knew from experience the proneness of journalists to lie.

—Mark Twain

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Notes

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© 2013 Doug Underwood

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Underwood, D. (2013). Artful Falsehoods and the Constraints of the Journalist’s Life. In: The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353481_3

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