Today, I’d love to start a discussion about a topic I only learned about/ really considered when I started grad school: the “implied author.”

The term was coined by Wayne Booth in his book “The Rhetoric of Fiction.”

Even though I only heard the phrase after undergrad, the concept isn’t difficult to understand.

• Every piece of fiction that we read–whether written in first or third person–gives us a certain impression or image of the person who wrote it.
• This impression is called “the implied author” and may coincide more or less loosely with the personality or views of the actual person who wrote the text.
• Ideally, the author is in control of this “implied author,” because he crafts the image/persona of the implied author by his textual choices: what he says, how he says it, and what he chooses to leave out. To some degree, then, the implied author is…