It’s possible to have mixed feelings about “appropriation,” or, as the kids say now, “sampling.” Wasn’t it Twain who said, “Bad writers borrow but good writers steal.”

But, seriously, I was devastated by the controversy that emerged around Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. It was one of my favorite books, an amazing picture of the harshness of the Western experience and what it did to people (right up there with My Antonia and Old Jules and Dalva), and to find it all based, allegedly, on uncredited diaries hurts. There’s recently been a brief tempest about acknowledgement pages in novels, which is just another aspect of the same question. A bit of showing off masquerading as erudition–at least sometimes. (Ahem…there are a lot of acknowledgments in The Dark Streets.)

Ultimately, I think integrity has to rule–not stealing a thought from another writer without redigesting it, not poisoning the well of history by clearly signalling any changes from known reality, etc. Nothing is simple, but it’s a starting point.