Settling the Borderland

Settling the Borderland deals with the intimate connection between journalism and literature, both fields in which work by women has been underrepresented. This book has a twin focus: the work of journalists who became some of the greatest novelists, poets, and short-story writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America, several of whom are men, and contemporary journalists who best exemplify the effective use of literary techniques in news coverage. Although five women are emphasized here (Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Joan Didion, Sara Davidson, and Susan Orlean), three men whose work was profoundly influenced by journalism also are included. Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and John Steinbeck are well known as writers of poetry, short stories, and novels, but they, too, are among the “other voices” rarely included in studies of literary journalism. In Settling the Borderland, Jan Whitt presents a thorough analysis of the increasingly indistinct lines between truth and fiction and between fact and creative narrative in contemporary media.

Author Biography

Jan Whitt is associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Whitt’s first book with UPA, Reflections in a Critical Eye: Essays on Carson McCullers, is winner of the 2008 Eric Hoffer Book Award culture category, second place winner in the ForeWord Magazine 2007 Book Award women’s issues category and a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards anthology and collections category.