Truth and Fiction in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood Essays -- In Cold Bl

How In coldness Blood Capote Desensitized Our Ability to Differentiate Between Truth and Fiction. Reading In Cold Blood brought me a new-fangled literary and psychological understanding. I realized what such a heinous murder would do to a town like Holcomb, Kansas. I always took my childishness 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 alternate of literary criticism on the book as I could find. I began to consider the impact of Capote on todays ground-on-fact books and movies. My goal was to discover whether the blurring of the line among truth and fiction has befogged how we, as readers and viewers, differentiate between truth and fiction. What I learned (or didnt 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 work s of fiction based on true facts (books that Capote would have said were non-fiction novels), books such as Norman Mailers The Executi acers Song, Joan Didions The White Album, and Capotes In Cold Blood (par. 13). At the end of the semester, one of her students said, Ive really enjoyed this course, but Im worried that its hardened me. I mean, I dont 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... ...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. capital of Minnesota Magazine. 14 pars. November 1995. InfoTrac. Yagoda, Ben. In Col d 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. index, Larry. Truman Capote and the Murder that Horrified a Nation. Larry King Live. CNN. 25 November 1997. Transcript. Lexis-Nexis. Knickerbocker, Conrad. 1960s Kansas Death Trip. New York Times. 9 pars. 6 October 1966, late ed. Lexis-Nexis.