It's not so much that he embellishes what happens but seems to have fabricated context to write about at all. In the essay where he visits a midwestern state fa

It's not so much that he embellishes what happens but seems to have fabricated context to write about at all. In the essay where he visits a midwestern state fair with a long-time local acquaintance, for example, a lot of the interest of the story is in the observations and "folk witticisms" of his companion. That companion doesn't seem to have existed at all, which drastically changes the character of the piece and is not merely an embellishment. Similarly the cruise essay has a memorable scene where he plays a game of chess against a child. His biographer and close friend, who rarely challenges the DFW mythology directly, specifically calls that one out and explains why he believes it didn't happen and that child didn't exist. Again this isn't embellishing a detail for the sake of a good story, this is much closer to fiction writing, which in contemporary literature is also often closed tied to direct personal experience in this way. I don't think writing in this way is dishonest, fwiw, or that this indicates anything bad per se. I think characterizing it as journalism, or even nonfictions essays is a mistake though. It's easy to see why it would have been sold that way at the time, but we don't have to stay with that classification now. I don't think it's likely that DFW published anything that could be considered strictly nonfiction. Ambitious as he was, this is almost certainly the reason he never agreed to publish anything in the new yorker which would have been such an obviously ideal publication for his "nonfiction," if it weren't for their sophisticated and ruthless fact checkers.