Are they extinct?

We consider a particular type of author, which may no longer exist.

We have our favorite authors, as does anyone who reads (not everyone does).  One is Rudyard Kipling.  He is generally out of favor now, having been a casual racist and forthright imperialist.  But no one can deny that he was a master of the English language, in prose or verse.  He got his start as a writer in journalism, writing for an English-language paper in India when that was a British possession.  He credited that experience with instilling discipline, in making his writing both precise and concise (choosing exactly the right word, within the unforgiving limits of a column-width).  No doubt it also taught him to produce what was necessary, rather than honing a piece endlessly toward some imaginary perfection.

Almost contemporary, but far less known these days, was the American Richard Harding Davis.  He was also a journalist, a war-correspondent in the Spanish-American War and the Boer War (straddling the turn of the century), and also wrote novels.  In fact he and Kipling met in South Africa; by reports, neither was much impressed with the other.  He was very popular in his time, but almost forgotten after the First World War.

A third author is even less well-known, his fame more or less confined to Scotland: Neil Munro.  He is remembered now mostly for his short columns for the newspaper, telling of events in the life of various colorful (fictional) Glasgow characters; our astronomer stumbled upon a collection of them in an Edinburgh bookshop.  But he also wrote short stories of high quality, and several historical novels that we think are worth rereading.

The phenomenon of the journalist-author continued through at least the mid-twentieth century, with Ernest Hemingway and no doubt others we’ve missed.  We suggest that the discipline of journalism, and the practice it gave of writing, produced a set of authors with skills they might not otherwise have developed.  But it may be confined to a limited era.

It could not really have existed much before the explosion of literacy and the availability of telegraphic news, in the first half of the nineteenth century.  There were newspapers before then, but of a different sort, demanding a different sort of writing.  And now with the migration of information to the internet, the daily paper as the source of news and weekly columns (about colorful characters in Glasgow or elsewhere) is all but dead.

Are there still journalists-novelists?  We’re not familiar enough with current writing to name any.  With journalism now mostly video-based, it’s quite possible that newswriting has become a different genre, with different rules and disciplines.   It may not contribute any longer to the development of a novelist.  If this species has become extinct, what has taken its place?