Great journalist-authors of the Victorian era, such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, were particularly adept and prolific in narrative non-fiction. The full history of narrative non-fiction writing extends back even further, to the dawn of writing and tablets written in cuneiform: on those it was quite usual for instructional texts, perhaps about agriculture, to be cast in the form of narrative. One of the benefits of a classical education is that, when trudging painfully through Latin and Greek set books, you learn that much of what we like to think of as being recent innovation was not only present in the ancient world, but the scholars of the day analysed it very extensively. With narrative being such a human universal, it is not surprising that a great deal of non-fiction is written as narrative: so much that some authors have proclaimed it a (relatively new) form of non-fiction, and dubbed it variously creative, narrative, or literary non-fiction.
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