Students often want to know whether it’s okay to write in the first person. My answer: It depends on the story, the subject matter, the writer, the publication. First-person reportage doesn’t automatically render a piece of work un-literary, as you can see here, below, from these excerpts. While you’re at it, take a wee quiz: Name the journalist who wrote each. Answers follow.

1.

I travel constantly, up and down a certain line of railway that has a terminus in London. It is the railway for a large military depot, and for other large barracks. To the best of my serious belief, I have never been on that railway by daylight, without seeing some handcuffed deserters in the train.

It is the nature of things that such an institution as our English army should have many bad and troublesome characters in it. But, this is a reason for, and not against, its being made as acceptable as possible to well-disposed men of decent behaviour. …

I had got back again to that rich and beautiful port where I had looked after Mercantile Jack, and I was walking up a hill there, on a wild March morning. … The object of my uncommercial journey was to see some discharged soldiers who had recently come home from India… There were men who had been in many of the great battles of the great Indian campaign, among them; and I was curious to note what our discharged soldiers looked like, when they were done with.

2.

It was late afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with homemade cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.

3.

Another hot, heavy rain in Washington, at 4:33 on a wet Wednesday morning, falling like balls of sweat against my window. … Twelve feet wide and six feet tall, the high yellow eye of the National Affairs Suite looking across the rotting roofs of our nation’s capital at least a mile away through the haze and the rain to the fine white marble spire of the Washington Monument and the dark dome of the Capitol….Hillbilly music howling out of the radio across the room from the typewriter.

                  … And when it’s midnight in Dallas, I’ll be somewhere on a big jet plane… If I could only understand you, maybe I could cope with the loneliness I feel …

Honkey-tonk tunes and a quart of Wild Turkey on the sideboard, ripped to the tits on whatever it was in that bag I bought tonight from the bull fruit in Georgetown, looking down from the desk at yesterday’s huge Washington Post headline:

President Admits Withholding Data

Tape Shows He Approved Cover-up

4.

In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come for at least two hours.

The flower stalls looked bright and pretty along the promenade. “The flowers are all sold, Senores, For the funerals of those who were killed in the eleven o’clock bombing, poor souls.”

It had been clear and cold all day and all day yesterday and probably would be fair from now on. “What beautiful weather,” a woman said, and she stood, holding her shawl around her, staring at the sky. “And the nights are as fine as the days. A catastrophe,” she said, and walked with her husband toward a café.

It was cold but really too lovely and everyone listened for the sirens all the time, and when we saw the bombers they were like tiny silver bullets moving forever up, across the sky.

It gets dark suddenly and no street lights are allowed in Barcelona, and at night the old town is rough going. It would be a silly end, I thought, to fall into a bomb hole, like the one I saw yesterday, that opens right down to the sewers. Everything you do in war is odd, I thought; why should I be plowing around after dark, looking for a carpenter in order to call for a picture frame for a friend? I found Hernandez’s house in a back street and I held my cigarette lighter above my head to see my way down the hall and up the stairs and then I was knocking on a door and old Mrs. Hernandez opened the door and asked me to come in, to be welcome, her house was mine.

“How are you?” I said.

“As you see,” old Hernandez said, and he pushed his cap back on his forehead and smiled, “alive.”

5.

In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak. There was not much to do, a summer like that: there was the day they brought in the first B-29, an event to remember but scarcely a vacation program. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

1. Charles Dickens, 1860, The Great Tasmanian’s Cargo, about British soldiers in India who’d been imprisoned and shipped home after supposed insubordination; 2. Eric Blair (you know him as George Orwell), 1931, “The Spike,” about poverty in London; 3. Hunter S. Thompson, 1974, “The Scum Also Rises,” about Nixon/Watergate; 4. Martha Gellhorn, 1938, “The Third Winter,” about the Spanish Civil War; 5. Joan Didion, 1965, from “John Wayne: A Love Song”

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