In Cold Blood
Four murders in Kansas, reported for six years and written like a novel.
In 1959 two drifters murdered the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and Truman Capote went there with Harper Lee to report it, staying six years and interviewing the killers up to their execution. He called the result a nonfiction novel, and it established the form. Later scholarship showed he invented scenes and dialogue, which complicates the claim without diminishing the book’s force.
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Laurence Leamer
But he went there and wrote a masterpiece about the two killers who wiped out a farm family. In Cold Blood created a whole new kind of nonfiction as well as the true crime genre.
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