The New Yorker published a long-lost satirical short story called The I.O.U. by F. Scott Fitzgerald that mocks what could be now labelled “fake news” from the 1920s. The I.O.U. is a story about a narrator, the story’s protagonist, who is about to publish a nonfiction book about a man communicating with his dead nephew in the spirit world, when he meets the nephew in question on a train as he was given “the most intelligent-looking” passengers a copy of the book to review. The story’s opening paragraph includes the lines, read by the narrator: “All the columnists and communists (I can never get these two words straight) abuse me because they say I want money. I do — I want it terribly. My wife needs it. My children use it all the time. If someone offered me all the money in New York I should not refuse it. I would rather bring out a book that had an advance sale of five hundred thousand copies than have discovered Samuel Butler, Theodore Dreiser, and James Branch Cabell in one year. So would you if you were a publisher.” Thu-Huong Ha writes in Quartz: “Fitzgerald’s story is well timed for today’s atmosphere of media distrust, where the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurred by presidents and publishers alike.”

This exchange between the narrator and the “dead nephew” stands out in particular:

“It is fiction!”

“In a sense—” I admitted.

“In a sense? It is fiction! It fulfills all the requirements of fiction: it is one long sweet lie. Would you call it fact?”

“No,” I replied calmly. “I should call it nonfiction. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.”