To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of
trauma--crime, violence, warfare--as well as psychological profiling of
deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have
explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by
borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and
psychological terrain of their fiction. In this book, Doug Underwood
offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the
impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of
important journalist-literary figures in the United States and British
Isles from the early 1700s to today.
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies,
literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon
the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such
as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and
Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping
their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic
experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of
factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the
changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of
psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the
impact of trauma in their work.
The most extensive scholarly examination of the role that trauma has
played in the shaping of our journalistic and literary heritage,
Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss
discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame,
even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.
