Doug Underwood scouts border between fiction, journalism in new book

University of Washington - Doug Underwood is a University of Washington professor of communication. He answered a few questions about his latest book, " The Undeclared War between Fiction and Journalism: Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History. Q: What is the concept behind this book, and the meaning of its intriguing title? A: The book is about journalist-literary figures who have written both fiction and nonfiction, which have been in competition in the Western writing world since the beginnings of the modern newspaper and the modern novel in the 18th century. There's a lot of debate today about bias and where to find journalism you can trust. Those tensions began to show up a lot in the 1960s and the 1970s. New Journalism was a term developed by writers - mostly journalists - who wanted to blend journalism's fact standards with fiction writing's narrative style. The movement was connected to the countercultural mood of those times - the protests, the sense that conventional journalism wasn't revealing the truth about the Vietnam War.