Fictional successes along this line included Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), in which a Bostonian awakes from a mystical sleep in the year 2000 to find industry nationalized, equal distribution of wealth to all citizens, and class divisions eradicated a process that Bellamy called Nationalism.
In the annals of black marriage, even iconic (albeit fictional) successes like Cliff and Clair Huxtable get drowned out by a constant narrative of gloom and doom.
One of the attractions of a diary is the reader's knowledge that the story is constantly in the process of being constructed – even in fictional versions, the success of the book is dependent upon this being believable.
They have a fictional view that the "successes" are still what they were in 2000 and they just aren't.
But the show's success in creating a fictional universe has its downside, too.
I also use fictional heroes for inspiration because outlandish success can unleash my, at times, hidden courage.
The novel marks a return to a Japanese setting for Nothomb, a fictional territory in which she first found success in 1999 with Fear and Trembling, made into a film which found international success in 2003.
Yet "The Ugly American," which depicted the struggle against insurgent Communism in the fictional nation of Sarkhan, was the bigger success, spending 76 weeks on the best-seller list and selling roughly five million copies.
She enjoyed success in the role of fictional actress Rita Marlowe, both in the 1955 56 Broadway version and the 1957 Hollywood film version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Indeed, to a huge extent, we fooled ourselves into thinking that our national economic success was caused by our (fictional) embrace of extreme laissez-faire.
It was heroin that led Mr. Stahl, clean now for over a decade, to his latest success -- writing "I, Fatty," a fictional memoir of the silent film actor Roscoe Arbuckle, better known as Fatty.
