“Reporting can be made as interesting as fiction, and done as artistically,” he told Plimpton.Īccompanied by his childhood friend Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Capote made his way to Kansas to investigate the murders of the Clutter family. The first people he shared his nonfiction novel idea with, he said, thought of it as merely a remedy for writer’s block. “The human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time,” he told George Plimpton in a 1966 interview in The New York Times. Crime, he decided, could be the perfect vehicle. When he began writing professionally, Capote, who died 32 years ago today, theorized that journalism and creative writing could come together in the form of what he called the “ nonfiction novel.” The subject had to be right, however with journalism underpinning such a novel, the pitfall was that it could quickly date itself. He soon realized that it was the story he had been waiting to write for 20 years. In 1959, Truman Capote stumbled on a short article in The New York Times about a gruesome quadruple murder at a Kansas farm.
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