The idea that journalism is not “literature” is such a deeply entrenched prejudice that even writers and editors who have spent their lives in journalism and have achieved literary distinction as journalists sometimes speak as if what they write and edit is not literature. This prejudice can be viewed as a cultural successor to the one that despised novels—a prejudice current in Jane Austen’s lifetime and one she scoffs at in both her letters and her novels.

Reading almost any twenty consecutive pages of A. J. Liebling’s Second World War reportage offers an excellent demonstration of just how specious the distinction between journalism and literature can be, but it is a distinction that has helped to prevent Liebling from being recognized as the major American writer he is.