"Can you honestly tell me that novelists like Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and Harper Lee, did not convey history with extreme quality, accuracy, and effectiveness?" Joe .,,. I query that 'accuracy', Joe; in that the fiction-writer's 'accuracy', designed to motivate the narrative of his invented world while retaining the reader's interest by such devices as suspense, mystery, ambivalences of characters' motivations, humour, & so on, will surely not be of precisely the same nature as the 'accuracy' of the true historian, whose aim is purely to try & establish the facts of the matter to the best of his abilities & interpretations, hoping to gain the agreement of his readers -- & esp his fellow-students of history -- with such interpretations & theories & hypotheses as he may propound. ≈M≈
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