John D'Agata

Called by NPR "the most improbably entertaining book ever written," The Lifespan of a Fact is a retrospectively reconstructed and embellished exchange between D'Agata and his one-time fact-checker, Jim Fingal. The book illustrates their heated seven-year battle over a single essay by D'Agata that was ultimately published in The Believer magazine. In the book, D'Agata and Fingal discuss whether it is appropriate to change facts in writing that is both nonfiction and art. In 2018, The Lifespan of a Fact was made into a Broadway, one-act play starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale.

D’Agata is the editor of a three-volume series on the history of the essay, A New History of the Essay. It is made up of the volumes The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), and The Making of the American Essay (2016) for which the critic James Wood provided a foreword in which he writes:

In 1998 D’Agata moved to Iowa City, where he went on to complete his MFA in poetry at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and then an additional MFA in nonfiction at the University’s Nonfiction Writing Program. He subsequently taught writing and research at a number of different schools, including Colgate University, Columbia University, and the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, before returning to the University of Iowa in 2006, where he now directs the Nonfiction Writing Program.

John D’Agata (born 1975 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts) is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay." He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame," and "About a Mountain."