Michael Dirda

As soon becomes apparent, The Dream of the Great American Novel simply isn’t aimed at the common reader or even at many uncommon ones. The grateful audience for this book will be other scholars and teachers of American literature, who will plunder its pages for decades to come.

Before he died at the age of forty, London was the highest-​paid author in America. During an active literary life of less than two decades, he produced roughly fifty works of fiction, journalism, and autobiography, as well as scores of short stories.

The Lifespan of a Fact questions the degree of importance of that tacit “contract with the reader.” If a work is presented as nonfiction, must it be true? Or can it be kind of true, or just simply true to the subject as a whole even if not nit-pickingly correct?