Krakauer's Successful Tribute to McCandless: Balancing Fiction and Non-Fiction in Literary Journalism Taylor L. Schiewe College

Journalists, and authors of investigative literature, often struggle to keep their writing 100 percent truthful when researching cases with few leads and vague details. Writers tend to teetertotter on the edge of the truth in order to leave readers satisfied with as few questions possible at the end of their work. Although Jon Krakauer’s uses this style of story telling in his narrative account Into the Wild, while using pieces of both, he almost perfectly combines fact and fiction to create an intriguing yet honest tale. Using standard definitions of such complex concepts as non-fiction and "new" journalism, this paper aims to compare Krakauer’s use of fiction and non-fiction in relation to new journalism/literary journalism.

Into the Wild’s fictional elements do not outweigh the true facts stated by Jon Krakauer but are balanced nicely allowing the novel to be classified as a work of new journalism. Fiction is defined as “something invented by the imagination or feigned”, where as non-fiction is “writing or cinema that is about facts or real events” (Webster). These two types of writing are connected in a recently new way of non-fiction writing known as New Journalism or Literary Journalism. New Journalism is “Journalism that...