By Robert Rebein

These days we take for granted that creative nonfiction has earned its place within the pantheon of writing genres. But that hasn’t always been the case. As recently as the early 1990s, the so-called “fourth genre” was so little regarded that there were virtually no anthologies, textbooks, or journals devoted to it. That began to change in the mid-to-late ’90s, when, in the space of five years, an influential textbook, Robert Root and Michael Steinberg’s The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, was published, and the journals Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, and Fourth Genre each launched in quick succession.

It’s difficult to overestimate the role these journals played in elevating creative nonfiction to its current position vis-a-vis poetry, fiction, and drama. One sign of this ascension appears in the title to Joey Franklin and Patrick Madden’s introduction to Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years (Michigan State University Press, 2025), which boldly declares, “Fourth Genre? More Like First Genre!” Such boldness would have been difficult for founding editor Michael Steinberg to imagine, let alone express, when he prepared the first issue of Fourth Genre for publication in the winter of 1998, but judging by the contents of this retrospective anthology, it doesn’t feel out of place.

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