as i read kazin is reviewing-didion,jcoates,mailer,roth,fascinating stuff. he seems to have skipped over steinbeck-wonder why ?

Sounds Good Suzanne, I must look it up.

An excellent point of view, Ricki!
I am at once reminded of reading the book 'Stiff'. Actually an extremely fascinating and hysterical, non-fiction look at what happens to our bodies when we die!
The author then went on to write other follow-ups that were equally informative and hilarious.

Those biographies and autobiographies must give you an interesting insight into the fiction and poetry that those writers have written, Joe. Your contributions will be really valuable in the discussions of their works - I hope you join in.

I think there are several viewpoints with which you can look at the fiction v non-fiction debate. It can be as difficult, I would think, to make what can be a dry subject interesting for the general public. That brilliant book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything,' to me was sheer genius as it updated me on lots of scientific work that I otherwise wouldn't have even known about (and I'm not in any way, shape or form, a scientist). There are different aspects of talent to the creative and the communicative sides of literature, aren't there? A good non-fiction book has to communicate information and interpretation creatively and the most creative fiction writer will have no following at all if his ideas cannot be communicated well but the emphasis on each has a different balance.

I'd really like to hear more of your ideas.

I agree with your feelings that non-fiction seems to be regarded in a higher realm than fiction.
I find it MUCH harder to facilitate a captivating tale out of nothing, than to 'report' the facts after they have actually occurred.

i am reading about alfred kazin in KAZIN S AMERICA by ted solotaroff. i seem to be more fascinated by books about writers and their writing rather than the books they write. this book takes modern american writers and critiques them. hemingway is an example who became like a character in one of his novels as kazin said. the same can be said of fitzgerald. i get upset when readers seem to have more respect for non fiction than fiction. literary writers,not including science fiction ones, base all their stories on things that happened in their lives and the people they knew. i love to read the behind the scenes stories about stories. biographies and aubiographies about writers fill my book shelves along with the books they wrote: faulkner,fitzgerald,steinbeck,hemingway,plath,flannery oconnor,st vincent millay,sinclair lewis,updike,cheever, etc comments welcome