"Whenever I’m invited to teach 'writing' at some university, I refuse to ever use the fiction and nonfiction labels, and I particularly resist the word creative as applied to writing—that’s the most vulgar of them all. I only agree to one title, The Writing of the Text, and I only use teaching texts that transcend and defy traditional categories—Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, William Gass’s On Being Blue, Fitzgerald’s The Crackup, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. We’ve been brainwashed by the myth that fiction and poetry are more “creative” than criticism or reportage, a strictly American hang-up exploited by our universities to plug their seedy little Creative Writing departments, a notion that makes for very bad literature. Look at masterpieces like Max Frisch’s Sketchbooks, or James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, texts that defy most classifications and are as considerable works of art as any novel published in the West in the past years."
-- Francine du Plessix Gray, as interviewed by The Paris Review in 1987
Francine du Plessix Gray is a Pulitzer-nominated writer and critic who was born in Poland, grew up in France, and immigrated to the United States without speaking a word of English when she was ten years old. She spent two years working for United Press International in the 1950s as the only woman on the night desk. In 1968, a few years after she began contributing fiction and essays to The New Yorker, she became a staff writer at the magazine. Among her many books, there are these: Them: A Memoir of Parents; Lovers and Tyrants; Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colot; Simone Weil; and At Home with the Marquis de Sade. du Plessix Gray lives in Connecticut.
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