Abstract
In a 1983 issue of Granta magazine, the editor Bill Buford introduced to the British reading public a “new fiction . . . emerging from America” that he famously dubbed “dirty realism.” His coinage pointed to the low-life subject matter of many of the short stories published, though he did note that in their “plainest of plain styles” they shared the distinction of “[maintaining] complete control on the simple objects and events that they ask us to witness.” After reviewing subsequent debate on the validity of the Dirty Realist label, I suggest that the stories of Raymond Carver and others revived an exhausted American literary scene with their commitment to a purified literariness. Taking as paradigmatic Richard Ford’s collection of stories set in Montana, Rock Springs (1988), I argue that this writing insists on the value of truthful representation in and for itself, recalling American fiction to the experiential aesthetic that Jean-Paul Sartre so admired in the work of Hemingway.
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