Michael Ryan: Authority and Authenticity (July 1996)

The term “moral authority” as it relates to writing may seem antiquated, Michael Ryan notes. But in this lecture he makes an updated case for it, contrasting Chekhov’s argument about the importance of striving for objectivity in Tolstoy’s War and Peace with our own more subjective sense of authority. Ryan discusses Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz as an example of the nobility of Levi’s attempt to tell exactly what it was like to live through this; of our moral imperative as writers to try to tell, or embody, truth.