Unbroken

I have finished reading "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption". I cannot think of an adequate way to describe the courage and endurance of Louis Zamperini. Truly an amazing story.

While reading this story, it became clear that most of the events had been told repeatedly before they were written down.  They had the cadence of an oral history.  When I got to the end of the book, I found that after the war, Louis Zamperini spent years telling his story to various groups.  Whether intentionally or not, this allowed him to hone the way he told the story to make it very accessible to an audience.

I had the same sense of an oral history when I read the 'Little House on the Prairie' stories.  I believe that Laura Ingall Wilders told these stories repeatedly to her sister who went blind.  The process of telling them orally influenced the way they were presented in the book.

This probably used to happen more - before literacy was widespread and before the printing press made printing accessible to more authors.