This best-selling anthology is a comprehensive and indispensable introduction to the way creative nonfiction is written today. The Fourth Genre offers the most thorough and teachable introduction available to the cutting-edge genre of creative nonfiction. While focusing on the nonfiction form, it acknowledges the literary impulse of nonfiction to be a fourth genre equivalent to poetry, fiction, and drama. This anthology is the first to draw on the common ground of the practicing writer and the practical scholar, and of creative writing practice and composition theory, in an attempt to bridge the gaps between the teaching of composition, creative writing, and literature in English departments.