Truth and Fiction in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

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How In Cold Blood Capote Desensitized Our Ability to Differentiate Between Truth and Fiction.

Reading In Cold Blood brought me a new literary and psychological understanding. I realized what such a heinous murder would do to a town like Holcomb, Kansas. I always took my childhood for granted; nothing bad happened in our town, nothing equal to the ugliness of the Clutter murder. After rereading In Cold Blood, I read every piece of literary criticism on the book as I could find. I began to consider the impact of Capote on today's based-on-fact books and movies. My goal was to discover whether the blurring of the line between truth and fiction has befogged how we, as readers and viewers, differentiate between truth and fiction.

What I learned (or didn't learn).

Wendy Lesser, in an article for the Los Angeles Times, wrote of her interest in murder in literature. She went so far as to teach a literature class at UC Santa Cruz on murder. The class focused on works of fiction based on true facts (books that Capote would have said were non-fiction novels), books such as Norman Mailer's The Executioners Song, Joan Didion's The White Album, and Capote's In Cold Blood (par. 13). At the end of the semester, one of her students said, " 'I've really enjoyed this course, but I'm worried that it's hardened me. I mean, I don't know how seriously I take murder anymore'" (par.15). Lesser replied that by looking at murder as art, you move away from the seeing it as murder (par.16).

Truman Capote claimed to have invented a new type of literature with In Cold Blood, the non-fiction novel (Plimpton, par 2). Although others (particularly Daniel DeFoe in A Journal of the Plague Year) had used this technique b...

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...into small-town Kansas with his long floating scarf and his negligees." The Guardian. 76 pars. 14 February 1998. Lexis-Nexis.

Swanson, William. "Murder, He Wrote." MPLS-St. Paul Magazine. 14 pars. November 1995. InfoTrac.

Yagoda, Ben. "In Cold Facts, Some Books Falter." The New York Times. 18 pars. 15 March 1998, late ed. Lexis-Nexis. Works Consulted

Boxer, Sarah. "When Truth Challenges Fiction and Becomes Art." The New York Times. 13 pars. 8 May 2000, late ed. Lexis-Nexis.

Fremont-Smith, Eliot. "Books of the Times: In Cold Blood." New York Times Book Review. 12 pars. 10 January 1966. Lexis-Nexis.

King, Larry. "Truman Capote and the Murder that Horrified a Nation." Larry King Live. CNN. 25 November 1997. Transcript. Lexis-Nexis.

Knickerbocker, Conrad. "1960's Kansas Death Trip." New York Times. 9 pars. 6 October 1966, late ed. Lexis-Nexis.

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