The Triumph of Narrative

A lively, strikingly original look at the prevalence and endurance of stories in our lives and our culture.

When I hear a good story, I have an almost physical need to tell it. Of all the ways we communicate with one another the story has established itself as the most comfortable, the most versatile.

In The Triumph of Narrative, celebrated journalist and critic Robert Fulford explores narrative in all of its forms–from conversation, gossip, and urban legends to journalism, literature, film and television. Fulford vividly illustrates how storytelling formed the core of civilized life, how stories shape us as much as we shape stories, and why the human appetite for narrative persists.

Pursuing his subject across a landscape that includes The Birth of a Nation, Chinatown, television news, Twain, Hemingway and Nabokov, sex scandals, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fulford brilliantly elucidates the timeless elements of narrative and articulates the intimate connections between stories and how we live and view reality. During an era when mass media and mass leisure have enabled us to spend much more time absorbing stories than any of our ancestors could, The Triumph of Narrative is an incisive look at one of our most fundamental, irreplaceable needs.