Accuracy Of In Cold Blood

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood claims to be a true account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Pioneering a new genre, Capote attempted to mix the poetic and literary elements of fiction with factual information, calling it the “non-fiction novel.” However, he failed to do so, sacrificing fact for fiction, shaping the events of the murder in his vision in order to make a statement about criminals and capital punishment.

Capote tried to claim that his entire book was true to the point where it was even without “minor distortions.”In his interview with George Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel,” Capote tells of how he trained himself to transcribe conversation without using a tape recorder; he was able to

This would make the reader question if what they're reading is just something Capote thought he remembered a person telling him as he could easily mix up what had been said to him. Capote’s accuracy can also be questioned due to the sheer amount of revisions he made before releasing the novel as five thousand were made in the ten weeks before In Cold Blood was published. “Though one assumes that revisions represent corrections, verifiable evidence might reveal otherwise,” Jack De Bellis wrote in “Vision and Revisions: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.” Capote erred in identifying the placement of Hickock and Smith’s tattoos, putting them on the wrong sides of the men’s bodies in the published edition. Even mishandling small details makes the reader question Capote’s credibility due to the many discrepancies that were found after the book’s publication. Errors that could've been corrected were never changed and there were mistakes that “even a reader of Life or Newsweek might uncover with little difficulty.” (De Bellis) Larger discrepancies were uncovered as well in “In Cold Fact” by Phillip K. Tompkins such as the excerpt from official

At the end of the seventy-seventh chapter of the novel, Capote created sympathy for Smith by having Mrs. Meier say “I heard him crying. I turned on the radio. Not to hear him. But I could. Crying like a child. He'd never broke down before, shown any sign of it. Well, I went to him. The door of his cell. He reached out his hand. He wanted me to hold his hand, and I did, I held his hand, and all he said was, ‘I’m embraced by shame.’” In “In Cold Fact,” Tompkins stated that in his telephone conversation with Mrs. Meier, she said that she'd never heard him cry or say that he was embraced by shame. In fact, she actually saw very little of Smith and hadn't told Capote such things either. (Tompkins) Not only did he fabricate this event, but it was created purely to make the reader feel for the murderer. This is displayed in the many times that Capote delves into Smith’s past as well, telling of the traumas he faced as a child. He displays far less sympathy for Hickock, however, as he depicts him as a “shifty-eyed sociopath whose intellectual heights reach no higher than girlie and car magazines,” according to J. J. Maloney in “In Cold Blood: A Dishonest Book.” Hickock was portrayed as a man who had a nice childhood, but he grew into a man with no morals as he stole and pursued little girls, like the twelve-year-old he tried to seduce while in Miami with Smith along with trying to rape Nancy Clutter