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Aren't there works that blend fiction and fact?
Q: Aren't there works that blend fiction and fact, and isn't that a type of lying?
A: To begin with, there is a crucial distinction between blending fiction and fact, on the one hand, with theft of ideas or writing, on the other. In addition, I think of these blends as falling in three categories. There is the fiction work that has an historical setting. John Wideman's book Philadelphia Fire (1991) blends the facts surrounding the Philadelphia police's bombing of a house in 1985 with characters Wideman invented.
There is also the history that is a plausible description of real events. These "amplified" histories include Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return of Martin Guerre (1983, one year after the movie).
Then there is fiction masquerading as documented history. Oliver Stone's films and Edmund Morris' "biography" of Ronald Reagan, Dutch (1999), are both examples. Morris' work is more disappointing to historians than Stone's, because we see Stone as a filmmaker and not as a documentarian. Morris, until he wrote Dutch, was a well-respected presidential biographer. Then he wrote himself in as a childhood friend of Reagan, aged himself, and invented a child, and called it history. Few historians see these fictions as legitimate devices for the telling of a story that claims to have some documentation.
I love a good story. I just hate finding out that something is fiction (or not the purported author's work) when it was advertised as something else.
References
Robert Finlay, "The Refashioning of Martin Guerre," American Historical Review 93 (June 1988): 553-71; and Davis' response, "On the Lame," op cit., 572-603. (What do you think "op cit." means?)
Warren Goldstein, "'Dutch': an Object Lesson for History and Biography," Chronicle of Higher Education (15 Oct. 1999).