This course will examine the intertextual movement of people from non-fiction (primarily history books and the news) to fiction. When do people who become characters in fiction keep their names? Migrants from history to fiction acquire interiorities and the characteristics that mark verisimilitude. When is such fictionalization permissible? Are there ethical constraints? When is the reader aware of the changes? How have the ethical and aesthetic rules changed in the last two decades? What difference does it make if the history and the fiction that people move between are postcolonial and not Western canonical? To understand the movement from history to fiction, we will compare it to a similar but not identical migration: of people from history books and the news to cinema, specifically to the biopic. In this migration names are more likely to remain the same but narrative events and their sequence are more likely to be changed. Film, it seems, has its own constraints, different from prose fiction's, that it must accommodate history to.