![]() ![]() Stein says it best in the introduction to The Times of Robert Kennedy, where she uses the term “oral narrative” to describe their book, adding that, “Oral history has been largely thought of as the collecting of interview transcripts for storage in archives in order to provide historians with research material. In these times when the term “oral history” is used to define anything from a single, edited interview to a collection of interviews published as an anthology, we decided to clarify our definition of the “narrative oral history.” For the record, when we use this term, we mean a book of edited passages from a collection of interviews and additional texts that are tightly woven together into an accurate chronology, creating a carefully crafted narrative. ![]() Stein and Plimpton’s masterpiece, Edie: American Girl, published in 1982 perfected, if not invented, the narrative oral history genre. ![]() When Jean Stein and George Plimpton began compiling their book American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, using the oral history format, little did they realize that they were inventing a revolutionary new literary genre that, ten years later, would land them on the best-seller list. ![]()
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