She was a close friend of Truman Streckfus Persons, and when the writer we know as Truman Capote went to Kansas to research the murders that became the 'factional' subject matter of In Cold Blood , Harper Lee, classic fiction writer, went with him. I did wonder, incidentally, what satisfaction academe could have taken from allowing this one to get away. Not all of the pieces in Peter Craven's The Best Australian Essays 1999 are as evenly satisfying as Hazel Rowley's 'Mockingbird Country' or as Amy Witting's sensational essay about loyalty and John Kerr, which, fittingly, opens the collection. Read the two on different days. Journalism has lost caste and sidles towards literature.
History spills out of the academy.
Fiction, critique, memoir, analysis, political opinion, commentary and polemic interweave. Non-fiction in its currently vigorous efflorescence is 'just the essay writ large'. Certainly Craven's selection demonstrates extraordinary variety. Whether it corrals 'the essay writ large', is controversial. Some of these pieces, like Peter Coleman's critique of Cassandra Pybus' The Devil and James McAuley , nail the lid down.