Would D'Agata claim that these writers' adherence to fact diminishes their art?
Six years earlier, in the Times Literary Supplement, John Ryle had noted that the writer was "regarded less favourably, by readers in Africa itself, and by Africanist scholars and reporters who have come to doubt his adherence to fact".
Those looking for a perfect adherence to fact have been looking for the wrong thing from memoir all along: that goal is not only impossible to achieve, given the distortions of memory, but would prove untenably boring if it ever were.
But had a prosecutor written a book arguing that the machinery of death is fantastic, just trust him, Dow himself would weep for strict adherence to facts, however ungainly.
People need a philosophy that is both empiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for religious belief.
Echoing Hayek's critique, many scholars closer to us have noted that economics' remarkable emphasis on analytical rigor, elegance and formal conventionalism, their aspirations to "micro-theory-like precision" are often obtained at the expense of a close adherence to facts, and at the risk of irrelevance (Caballero 2010, 100; also McCloskey 1985, Mayer 1993, Krugman 2009, Romer 2015).
While some reviewers have praised the film for its ostensible "historical accuracy", others have strongly questioned its adherence to historical fact.
Championing his own strict adherence to observed fact, Burroughs singled out four books for criticism: Seton's Wild Animals I have Known, Roberts Thee Kindred of the Wild, William Davenport Hulbert's Forest Neighbours, and Long's School of the Woods.
But this season, a handful of plays on New York stages and beyond are demonstrating a strong adherence to the facts, with documentary-style texts that have been drawn verbatim from interviews and transcripts.
"Anger is a wasted emotion," says the narrator of "The Dew Breaker," her most recent novel; in telling her family's story, she follows this dictum almost to a fault, giving us a memoir whose cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an astringent undercurrent of melancholy, a mixture of homesickness and homelessness.
That song, about an Old West outlaw who killed dozens of men, begins with the lyric, "John Wesley Harding was a friend to the poor," and showcases Mr. Dylan's penchant for creating songs built around compelling narratives, if not necessarily strict adherence to the facts, Mr. Kennedy said.
