Is it plagiarism?

A recent article from Slate examines whether Ian McEwan committed plagiarism in his 2001 bestseller Atonement. The author, Jack Shafer, contends, "As a long-time magazine and newspaper editor, I'd have no trouble firing McEwan for writing as he did if he worked for me." Shafer reproduces a long passage from a memoir, No Time for Romance, followed by a strikingly similar passage from McEwan's novel.

I have sympathy for McEwan, who acknowledges his source in an author's note at the end of the book. As fiction writers, we are often dependent on the mediated accounts of others to tell us about topics we haven't experienced, and we often "steal" the best details to cobble together stories. Given the extent of McEwan's borrowing, though, he might have worded his acknowledgement a bit more strongly (he includes No Time for Romance in a list of books to which he is "indebted"). I still think, however, Atonement is one of the best books I've read in recent years, and part of the strength of the book derives from McEwan's use of multiple sources to make the WWII era come to life.

For another take on plagiarism in creative writing, see Malcom Gladwell's 2004 article in the New Yorker in which he describes his experience confronting a playwright accused of plagiarizing his work.